Organizational Silence: A Barrier to Change and Development in a Pluralistic World

Morrison & Milliken · Voice & Silence, Power & Equity · Academy of Management Review · 2000 · Paywalled

Introduced 'organisational silence' as a collective phenomenon — the widespread withholding of concerns, information, and opinions. Argued that managerial beliefs and structural features create climates in which silence becomes the default. A foundational paper for understanding the supply side of voice.

Morrison, E.W. and Milliken, F.J. (2000) 'Organisational silence: A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world', Academy of Management Review, 25(4), pp. 706–725.

Neighbours (40)

• Calculus of Voice
• Employee Voice and Silence (paper)
• Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (paper)
• Language and Symbolic Power (paper)
• Psychological Safety: A Meta-Analytic Review and Extension (paper)
• Accountability: The Neglected Social Context of Judgment and Choice (paper)
• An Exploratory Study of Employee Silence: Issues That Employees Don't Communicate Upward and Why (paper)
• Communication Failures: An Insidious Contributor to Medical Mishaps (paper)
• Employee Silence: Quiescence and Acquiescence as Responses to Perceived Injustice (paper)
• Helping and Voice Extra-Role Behaviors: Evidence of Construct and Predictive Validity (paper)
• Independent Review on the Care Given to Mrs Elaine Bromiley (paper)
• Leadership Behavior and Employee Voice: Is the Door Really Open? (paper)
• Speaking Up and Speaking Out: The Leadership Dynamics of Voice in Organizations (paper)
• Speaking Up to Higher-Ups: How Supervisors and Skip-Level Leaders Influence Employee Voice (paper)
• The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process (paper)
• The Possibilities of Accountability (paper)
• The Tenerife Disaster
• Who Takes the Floor and Why: Gender, Power, and Volubility in Organizations (paper)
• A Stupidity-Based Theory of Organizations (paper)
• Development and Validation of the Organizational Dissent Scale (paper)
• Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascos (paper)
• Implicit Voice Theories: Taken-for-Granted Rules of Self-Censorship at Work (paper)
• Moving off the Map: How Knowledge of Organizational Operations Empowers and Alienates (paper)
• On the Receiving End: Sensemaking, Emotion, and Assessments of an Organizational Change Initiated by Others (paper)
• Overcoming Walls and Voids: Responsive Practices That Enable Frontline Workers to Feel Heard (paper)
• Psychological Antecedents of Promotive and Prohibitive Voice: A Two-Wave Examination (paper)
• Quitting Before Leaving: The Mediating Effects of Psychological Attachment and Detachment on Voice (paper)
• Silence in Organizations and Psychological Safety: A Literature Review (paper)
• Silence That May Kill: When Aircrew Members Don't Speak Up and Why (paper)
• Status Characteristics and Social Interaction (paper)
• The Cost of Silence: Normalization of Deviance and Groupthink (paper)
• Voice Flows to and around Leaders: Understanding When Units Are Helped or Hurt by Employee Voice (paper)
• Watermelon Effect
• Why Status Matters for Inequality (paper)
• Barriers to PS
• CAP 737: Flight-crew Human Factors Handbook (paper)
• Open Secrets & Half-Baked Ideas
• The Persistence of Safety Silence: How Flight Deck Microcultures Influence the Efficacy of Crew Resource Management (paper)
• Types of Silence
• Present but Useless: Why Power and Culture Create Structural Silence in the Cockpit (paper)