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 one's evaluation of organisational circumstances from those perceived as capable of effecting change, and the definition does more work than it looks: silence so defined can occur in the midst of sound, since complaining to family, or to colleagues who can change nothing, leaves it 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, knows alternatives exist, and has not given up; its emotions are fear, anger and cynicism, and it takes little external prompting to break. Acquiescence is deeper: relatively involuntary, less conscious, resting on acceptance of the circumstances as normal, with limited awareness that alternatives exist. Its dominant emotion is resignation, and it takes far more to break. Two structural consequences make this more than a taxonomy. The route out of acquiescence runs through quiescence, because becoming ready to speak requires first consciously rejecting the inevitability of the circumstances. And the two respond to outside events in opposite shapes: small increases in the salience of an external event move the quiescent quickly, while only a large and public event moves the acquiescent, which is the mechanism the paper reads into the 1998 wave of assault and harassment allegations in the Canadian military, where the first published accounts removed the belief that any one complainant belonged to a deviant minority.

The uncomfortable finding sits near the end. Silence is not uniformly bad and voice is not uniformly good: the quiescent, still angry and aware, are the ones the authors expect to move toward retribution, including sabotage, and for some people acquiescence may be the most adaptive response available. 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 those of a conceptual chapter and the authors name them: no data, a model assembled from disparate literatures, the military case used explicitly for illustration rather than as grounds for theory, and a scope deliberately confined to silence as a response to injustice seen from the position of the person mistreated. They close by warning against a rush to measurement before the construct's boundaries are settled, which is roughly what happened next. The bridge to psychological safety is direct although neither the term nor Edmondson appears anywhere: the risk factors named here, climates of silence, 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 distinction supplies what 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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