Exploring Newcomer Voice and Silence Dynamics: The Role of Organizational Socialization
The finding that being well socialised into an organisation makes a newcomer more likely to offer improvements and slower to raise problems, which is an uncomfortable result for anyone who treats induction as an unambiguous good. Reissner, Guenter and de Jong followed 198 organisational newcomers across four waves spanning their first seven to eight months, using random coefficient growth models to separate what changes within a person over time from what differs between people. They track three behaviours the field often collapses: promotive voice (suggestions for improvement), prohibitive voice (flagging problems, which carries the greater interpersonal risk because pointing out dysfunction implies that someone has failed) and silence, the deliberate withholding of input, established by Sherf and colleagues as a distinct construct rather than as the absence of voice. The trajectories diverge, which is the first contribution. Promotive voice stays flat, and the authors confirm this by equivalence testing rather than inferring stability from a non-significant result, which is more methodological care than the claim usually receives. Prohibitive voice rises steadily. Silence does not move at all, against their prediction: newcomers become more willing to flag problems without becoming any less willing to withhold other things, so voice and silence run on separate tracks inside the same people. The explanation they offer, tentatively, is that implicit voice theories, the taken-for-granted rules Detert and Edmondson describe, are laid down early and prove resistant to experience. The second contribution is what socialisation does to those tracks, and it does two opposite things at once. Better socialised newcomers show more promotive voice throughout. But socialisation flattens the rise in prohibitive voice, so the people who understand the organisation best are the slowest to start naming what is wrong with it. The authors read this as risk calibration rather than as timidity: learning the place includes learning what it costs to challenge it, and the well socialised newcomer has correctly priced a risk the badly socialised one is still underestimating. Their practical conclusion is unusually blunt for the genre, that organisations should be careful what they wish for, because onboarding someone to fit in socially may be the very thing that stops them saying what is wrong. Read alongside Bransby and colleagues, whose paradise lost effect describes the same window from the other side: newcomers arrive with more psychological safety than their tenured colleagues and lose it as they settle in. Nothing is lost here, strictly: prohibitive voice rises for everyone, and socialisation only slows the climb. But the direction of the effect is the same, the organisation's own induction working against the challenge it most needs from fresh eyes. The limits are ordinary and worth stating. All measures are self-reported by the same person, the sample is an online panel rather than an intact organisation, attrition is considerable (198 at the first wave, 89 at the fourth), and eight months is early: nothing here says what happens at year three. Linear models fitted better than quadratic ones, so any curvature in these trajectories lies beyond the reach of four measurement points.
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Neighbours (12)
- Calculus of Voice
- Conceptualizing Employee Silence and Employee Voice as Multidimensional Constructs
- Distinguishing Voice and Silence at Work: Unique Relationships with Perceived Impact, Psychological Safety, and Burnout
- Employee Voice and Silence: Taking Stock a Decade Later
- Development and Validation of the Organizational Dissent Scale
- Emergence & Dynamics of PS
- Implicit Voice Theories: Taken-for-Granted Rules of Self-Censorship at Work
- Paradise Lost (and Restored?): A Study of Psychological Safety over Time
- Psychological Antecedents of Promotive and Prohibitive Voice: A Two-Wave Examination
- Barriers to PS
- Rebuilding PS
- Types of Silence