Employee Silence: Quiescence and Acquiescence as Responses to Perceived Injustice

Pinder & Harlos · Voice & Silence, Power & Equity, Trust & Interpersonal · Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management · 2001 · Paywalled

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The paper that split silence in two, and the source of a distinction this map already relies on. Pinder and Harlos define employee silence as the withholding of genuine expression about a person's evaluation of their organisational circumstances from those perceived as capable of effecting change or redress, and the definition does more work than it looks. Silence so defined is not the absence of speech: it can occur in the midst of sound and language, and complaining to family, or to colleagues who can change nothing, leaves the silence intact. What ends silence is not speaking but addressing someone with the power to act. On that footing they separate two states. Quiescence is conscious, relatively voluntary and uncomfortable withholding by someone who knows the treatment is unjust, is aware that alternatives exist, and has not given up; its emotions are fear, anger, cynicism, despair and possibly depression, and it takes little external prompting to break. Acquiescence is deeper: relatively involuntary, less conscious, resting on acceptance of the circumstances as normal or inevitable, with limited awareness that alternatives exist. Its dominant emotion is resignation, and it takes far more to break. The two are set against eight dimensions, among them voluntariness, consciousness, acceptance, stress level, awareness of alternatives and propensity to voice and to exit, and stress sits higher in quiescence than in acquiescence, because the acquiescent are no longer struggling. Two structural consequences make this more than a taxonomy. First, the route out of acquiescence runs through quiescence: to become ready to speak, an acquiescent employee must first consciously reject the inevitability of the circumstances, so both entering and leaving acquiescence passes through a quiescent state. Second, the two respond to external events in opposite shapes. The probability that a quiescent employee speaks rises steeply with small increases in the salience of an outside event and then flattens, while for the acquiescent the curve accelerates from near nothing, so only a large and public event moves them. That is the mechanism behind the pattern the paper is built around: when a first wave of allegations of sexual assault and harassment in the Canadian military was published in 1998, others followed quickly, which the authors read through Noelle-Neumann's spiral of silence as the removal of the belief that one belongs to a deviant minority. The uncomfortable finding sits near the end. Silence is not uniformly bad and voice is not uniformly good. Because quiescent employees remain angry and aware, the authors expect them to be more motivated than the acquiescent toward retributive action, overt or covert, including sabotage and interpersonal aggression, and they suggest that for some people moving into acquiescence may be the most adaptive response available, since believing the injustice customary may make them feel safer. They ask for research into optimal levels of silence, noting that too little silence, a group in constant complaint, is dysfunctional too. A corpus that treats voice as the good and silence as the deficit should sit with that. The limits are the ordinary limits of a conceptual chapter, and the authors name them. There is no data here: the model is assembled from disparate literatures, and the Canadian military case is used, in their own words, for convenience and illustration, with an explicit disclaimer that it does not constitute grounds for a grounded theory. The propositions about individual predispositions, that low self-esteem, high communication apprehension and an external locus of control incline a person toward quiescence, are offered as propositions, and the authors single out the locus of control claim as the least supported by existing theory and evidence among them. The scope is deliberately narrow: silence as a response to injustice, seen from the position of the person mistreated, not silence as strategy, not silence in benign circumstances, and not the view of perpetrators or observers. They close by warning against exactly what happened next, a rush to measurement before the boundaries of the construct are settled, citing early trust research as the cautionary case. The bridge to psychological safety is direct although neither the term nor Edmondson appears anywhere in the chapter: the situational risk factors named here, climates of silence, cultures of injustice, the deaf ear syndrome, limited voice channels and low position in the hierarchy, are the conditions psychological safety research measures from the other side, and the quiescence and acquiescence distinction supplies something that literature usually lacks, a vocabulary for the silence of someone who has stopped expecting anything to change.

Pinder, C.C. and Harlos, K.P. (2001) 'Employee silence: quiescence and acquiescence as responses to perceived injustice', Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management, 20, pp. 331-369.

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