Friday, April 4, 2014

Critical Analysis: Organizational Silence

Critical Analysis:  Organizational Silence
By: Jody R. South

The purpose of this essay is to briefly summarize Bisel & Arterburn’s article entitled “Making Sense of Organizational Member’s Silence: A Sensemaking-Resource Model” (2012, pp. 217-226), including the authors’ intent and theory.  Further, the essay to follow shall endeavor to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article as well as my personal, subjective opinions of the material as it is presented.

Intent and Theory

The major theme of the article was the sensemaking abilities of, and reasons for, employee reluctance to provide negative feedback to their managers and supervisors. Out of a sample of 226 adult employees, “180 (79.65%) were able to recall a situation in which they refrained from providing negative feedback” (Bisel & Arterburn, 2012, p. 219). Staff defended their quietness by employing both identity and expectation as sensemaking resources (p.219). Workers reasons for not reporting negative feedback are contained in the later portions of this paper. The article closes with a recommendation for further research into the causality of organizational silence (p. 224).
            
The article is rooted in several theories and philosophical perspectives which informed the authors’ research.  Among these perspectives are the frequency and commonality of employee reluctance to report issues to supervisory personnel (Perlow & Williams, 2003), as well as theories related to the type of issues that result in employee silence (Milliken, Morrison, & Hewlin, 2003).  Other perspectives include the possible consequences of delivering negative information (Withey & Cooper, 1989) and the ethics of employee silence (Miceli, Near, & Dworkin, 2008).
            
A theory postulated by Morrison and Milliken (2000) regarding the subtleties that lead to employee silence and how that silence thwarts organizational change, is a guiding concept that they employ throughout the article.  A large part of this theory centers on the possibility that corporate culture and sensemaking mutually affect each other (Morrison & Milliken, 2000).
            
The research performed by Bisel and Arterburn (2012) supplements the theory of Morrison and Milliken (2000) by studying how employees make sense of their decision to remain silent when presented with the opportunity to present negative feedback to management.  They then explain the procedure that they believe creates a silent culture.  The research question posed by the authors’ to those surveyed was as follows: “In what ways, do employees make sense of their decision to refrain from providing upward negative feedback to their supervisor, about their supervisor (i.e., remain silent)?”  (Bisel & Arterburn, 2012, p. 219).

Methodology

The methodology employed in the study included the subjective responses of the aforementioned sample of 226 employees, of which 180 “were able to recall a situation in which they refrained from providing negative upward feedback” (Bisel & Arterburn, 2012, p. 219).  The sample that included those employees who refrained from reporting negative information was comprised of roughly 65 percent females and 35 percent males, and an average of 40.86 years of age (p. 219).  These respondents were primarily based in one of 25 American states with the exception of a single Australian (p.219).  The experience level of the employees ranged from new employees to seasoned workers on the verge of retirement age who had zero to 45 years of experience in a supervisory role (p. 219). 
            
The methodologies employed to measure and investigate failure to report negative upward feedback included the recruitment of individuals from the researchers’ networks of professional contacts (Bisel & Arterburn, 2012, p. 219).  These workers were then instructed to solicit five of their professional contacts, and so forth, until the desired sample size was achieved (p. 219).  The individuals that agreed to participate in the study were then directed to take a survey over the Internet.  The survey included a permission form, a demographic questionnaire, an experiment, and lastly, the aforementioned research question (p.219).
            
The authors’ used a form of inductive, thematic data analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), which was employed to isolate, evaluate, and note the major thematic data arrays.  Of the 180 responses to the research question, 213 reasons were cataloged (Bisel & Arterburn, 2012, p. 220).  Responses were then collected into two major sensemaking resource banks and five motivation categories (p.220).

Results

The five motivation categories and percentage of responses generated by thematic analysis included the following:
·         Predicting harm to themselves (70.42%)
·         Constructing the supervisor as responsible (13.62%)
·         Questioning their own expertise (5.63%)
·         Predicting supervisors’ deafness (5.63%)
·         Constructing timing as inopportune (4.69%) (Bisel & Arterburn, 2012, pp. 219-220)
These motivation categories were sorted into two significant sensemaking sources to explain the respondents’ resolutions to remain silent: “perceptions of their own and the others’ identities and expectations about the future as informed by hierarchy” (p. 220). 
            
According to the data, the motivations for not communicating negative information vertically indicated that most affected employees fear that voicing negative information would have an adverse effect on them personally (Bisel & Arterburn, 2012, p. 220).  Fears included anxieties about managers terminating the employee’s employment, reducing their compensation, and diminishing the likelihood of future advancement prospects (p. 220).  These fears often originated from past experiences. 

Bisel and Arterburn (2012) noted that “although this study explores workers’ retrospective accounts, case studies would offer more contexts from which to understand organizational silence” (p. 224).  They proposed an auxiliary investigation of employee silence by reviewing case studies with the purpose of furthering comprehension of the factors that propagate a culture of silence (p.224).

Critique

I believe that the scope of the article was much too large for the manner in which it was conducted and reported.  Had the hypothesis of the study had been limited to a more constrained dataset (e.g. mid-western, United States citizens in white-collar professions, etc.), the results would have been refined enough to predict motivations for employee silence with reasonable confidence.  This report further failed to characterize deeper demographic data that might have influenced employee motivations.  Demographics such as race, religion, and education have the potential to impact the study and should be considered and reported.  Demographics could have been taken into account to study relationships between numerous combinations of employer/employee associations.  As an example, it might be useful to note the interactions between Asian, males, between the ages of 20 and 25, in white collar professions to female Indian supervisors between the ages of 50 and 55.  These deep datasets seem cumbersome, but are easily achievable through the use of relational databases. 
            
I further believe that, given the latitude of study, the sample size was much too small to produce the confidence intervals required for predicting the outcome of such a large population parameter.  The confidence interval should represent “values for the population parameter for which the difference between the parameter and the observed estimate is not statistically significant at the 10% level” (Cox & Hinkley, 1974, p.214).  Therefore, if the significance of the factor exists outside of a 90 percent confidence interval, then the probability of the event occurring by chance is less than or equal to 10 percent.

The authors’ believe that the findings of the study add to the previously noted studies by Morrison and Milliken (2003).  Further, they believe that their sensemaking-resource model is a groundbreaking structure for comprehending the “cultural expectations from which workers draw to justify their silence as a reasonable course of action” (Bisel & Arterburn, 2012, p. 224).  They also foresee their model employed to enlighten senior leadership on the subject of employee silence as well as to promote and encourage the constructive vertical criticism that successful organizations necessitate (p. 224).

The findings of this study, in my opinion, were largely predictable.  Some of the most interesting information that might have been extrapolated from the data was not presented by the authors.  For instance, Bisel and Arterburn (2012) noted, en passant, that those employees who refrained from reporting negative information was comprised of roughly 65 percent females and 35 percent males (p. 219).  What does the disproportional number women to men say about female silence in the workplace?  This subject alone would have made a more compelling, and more utilitarian study.

To end on a positive note, I appreciated the methodology in which the study participants were solicited, so long as the pool of candidates remained indicative of the intended population under study.  Further, as a prerequisite to understanding the authors’ methodology for reasoning, I enjoyed reading about the dissimilarity between inductive and deductive reasoning from adscititious sources external to this report (Holland, Holyoak, Nisbett, & Thagard, 1989).


References
Bisel, R. S., & Arterburn, E. N. (2012). Making sense of organizational members’ silence: A sense-making resource model. Communication Research Reports, 29(3), 217-226.
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative
Research in Psychology, 3(2) (pp. 77-101).

Cox, D. R., & Hinkley, D. V. (1974). Theoretical statistics. London: Chapman and Hall.
Holland, J. H., Holyoak, K. J., Nisbett, R. E., Thagard, P. R. (1989). Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning, and Discovery. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Morrison, E.W., & Milliken, F.J. (2000). Organizational Silence: A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world. Academy of Management Review, 25, 706-725.
Miceli, M.P., Near, J.P., & Dworkin, T.M. (2008). Whistle-blowing in organizations. New York, NY: Routledge.
Milliken, F.J., Morrison, E.W., & Hewlin, P.F. (2003). An exploratory study of employee silence: Issues that employees don’t communicate upward and why. Journal of Management Studies, 40, 1453-1476.
Perlow, L., & Williams, S. (2003). Is silence killing your company? Harvard Business Review, 81, 52-58.

Withey, M.J., & Cooper, W.H. (1989). Predicting exit, voice, loyalty, and neglect. Administrative Science Quarterly, 34, 521-539.

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