# Development and Validation of the Organizational Dissent Scale

*Kassing · Voice & Silence, Measurement & Method · Management Communication Quarterly · 1998 · Paywalled*

The scale-development paper that gave the communication-studies dissent tradition its instrument, and the anchor of a literature that ran parallel to the organisational-behaviour voice research for two decades with remarkably little traffic between them. Building on his 1997 model of employee dissent, Kassing defines organisational dissent as the expression of disagreement or contradictory opinions about organisational practices, policies and operations, and distinguishes the routes it takes by audience: articulated dissent, expressed openly and upward to audiences who can act on it; latent dissent, vented laterally to colleagues when upward channels feel adversarial or futile; and displaced dissent, carried outside the organisation to family and friends. The choice of route is governed by whether the dissenter expects to be read as constructive or adversarial and by the likelihood of retaliation, which is recognisably the same pair of judgements, efficacy and risk, that Morrison later placed at the centre of the voice-silence field, arrived at independently from a communication tradition rather than a management one. The paper reports the construction and validation of the Organisational Dissent Scale, the instrument through which most subsequent dissent research in this tradition runs; later work generally retained the articulated and latent subscales, while the displaced dimension proved less reliable and is often dropped. Its place on this map is as the missing twin of the voice literature: dissent research asks where disagreement goes when it cannot go up, which makes it unusually attentive to the lateral and external channels the voice literature tends to treat as residual categories. The limits are those of its method and moment: a self-report instrument developed on US samples, measuring dissent propensity rather than observed behaviour, with all the cross-cultural portability questions that follow. This node is built from the paper's abstract and its extensive use in the later literature rather than from the full text.

- **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/kassing-1998/
- **View the source paper:** https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318998122002
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## Neighbours (6)

- [Calculus of Voice](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/the-calculus-of-voice.md)
- [Employee Voice and Silence](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/morrison-2014.md) (paper)
- [Organizational Silence: A Barrier to Change and Development in a Pluralistic World](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/morrison-milliken-2000.md) (paper)
- [Barriers to PS](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/barriers-to-psychological-safety.md)
- [Drive, Dissent & Checklists](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/psychological-safety-70-drive-dissent-and-checklists.md)
- [The Relationship Between Organizational Dissent and Organizational Bullshit](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/croucher-et-al-2026.md) (paper)