# Silenced by Fear: The Nature, Sources, and Consequences of Fear at Work *Kish-Gephart · Voice & Silence · Research in Organizational Behavior · 2009 · Open access* A theoretical synthesis arguing that existing accounts of workplace silence — built around a conscious, deliberate 'expectancy-like mental calculus' weighing the costs and benefits of speaking up — capture only part of what actually happens, because they treat all fear experiences as equivalent. Drawing on evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, sociology and anthropology, the paper crosses fear intensity (driven by perceived threat severity and threat immediacy) with the amount of time available to respond, producing four qualitatively distinct types of in-the-moment silence. Non-deliberative defensive silence is a fully automatic freeze response to high-intensity fear with no time to respond — amygdala-driven 'low road' processing that bypasses conscious choice entirely. Schema-driven defensive silence occurs in two situations, high-intensity fear with time to think or low-intensity fear with no time to think, and involves conscious awareness of the decision to stay quiet but relies on fast, effortless matching against pre-existing schemas ('speaking up here is dangerous') rather than genuine weighing of alternatives; it can look deliberative in hindsight without ever having been so. Deliberative defensive silence — low-intensity fear, ample time — is the only quadrant that matches how prior literature has generally described silence: a conscious, considered cost-benefit calculation, though still coloured by fear's pessimistic bias toward overestimating risk. Repeated episodes eventually produce habituated silence, a default avoidance pattern that no longer needs a fresh fear trigger and can be mistaken for resignation when it is really fear's long shadow. The implication for any framework built on a deliberate calculus of voice, including the field's own dominant models, is that it describes only one corner of a much larger picture — a great deal of silence never goes through anything resembling deliberation at all. The paper traces the fear feeding this system to two sources. The evolutionary source treats fear of challenging higher-status others as a 'prepared fear' like fear of snakes or heights: more easily conditioned and far harder to extinguish than ordinary learned fears, because in ancestral environments confronting a dominant individual risked death, injury, or loss of status. A direct consequence: a psychologically safe environment doesn't erase this fear, it just keeps it from being triggered — a single bad experience with authority can re-activate it. The learned source runs through direct experience (being personally criticised for speaking up), vicarious learning (hearing the story of the colleague who was punished for it, often more powerful than firsthand experience), and socialisation across childhood, institutions, and national culture, with Hofstede's power-distance dimension predicting more fear of challenging authority in high-power-distance cultures specifically. Closes by proposing two forces that can help people speak up despite fear: anger, a biologically opposite 'approach' emotion that can override fear's withdrawal tendency but only when substantially stronger than the fear present, and risky to display upward; and voice efficacy, a learned, domain-specific belief in one's own competence to speak up well, built through accumulated positive experiences and the trainable skills — anger regulation, framing, emotional intelligence — that produce them. - **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/kish-gephart-detert-trevino-edmondson-2009/ - **View the source paper:** http://www.iot.ntnu.no/innovation/norsi-pims-courses/huber/Kish-Gephart,%20Detert,%20Trevio%20&%20Edmondson%20(2009).pdf - **Interactive map:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/?mode=papers&node=kish-gephart-detert-trevino-edmondson-2009 ## Connected concepts (14) - [Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/edmondson-1999.md) (paper) - [Calculus of Voice](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/the-calculus-of-voice.md) - [Conceptualizing Employee Silence and Employee Voice as Multidimensional Constructs](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/van-dyne-ang-botero-2003.md) (paper) - [Distinguishing Voice and Silence at Work: Unique Relationships with Perceived Impact, Psychological Safety, and Burnout](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/sherf-parke-isaakyan-2021.md) (paper) - [Employee Voice and Silence](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/morrison-2014.md) (paper) - [The Bases of Social Power](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/french-raven-1959.md) (paper) - [How We Respond](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/how-we-respond-matters.md) - [Leadership Behavior and Employee Voice: Is the Door Really Open?](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/detert-burris-2007.md) (paper) - [Speaking Up to Higher-Ups: How Supervisors and Skip-Level Leaders Influence Employee Voice](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/detert-trevino-2010.md) (paper) - [Collective Mind in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/weick-roberts-1993.md) (paper) - [Making it Safe: The Effects of Leader Inclusiveness and Professional Status on Psychological Safety and Improvement Efforts in Health Care Teams](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/nembhard-edmondson-2006.md) (paper) - [Reflections: Voice and Silence in Workplace Conversations](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/edmondson-besieux-2021.md) (paper) - [Barriers to PS](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/barriers-to-psychological-safety.md) - [Psychological Bravery](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/psychological-bravery.md)