As every company knows, employees are its greatest resource. It's more than a shame, then, that many workers are either not encouraged or afraid to speak up and communicate ideas at work. Employers are losing valuable knowledge and experience, and their companies are weaker for that loss.
Latent voice episodes and Upward voice
Latent voice episodes describe those moments at work when someone considers speaking up about an issue, problem, or even an improvement opportunity. How do people think about speaking up? The episodes are called "latent" because they are potential communications that may or may not in fact occur. Understanding the factors that encourage or inhibit people speaking up at work with the relevant ideas and concerns they have is the focus of this research.
Upward voice refers to communications directed to someone higher in the organizational hierarchy with the perceived power or authority to take action on the problem or suggestion. This is why leaders are inherently important to the improvement-oriented voice process — because leaders are the targets of voice. If they send signals that they are open, interested, and willing to act on subordinate voice, it is logical to expect that subordinates' motivation to do so will be increased; conversely, where subordinates perceive leaders' behavior to indicate it is either unsafe or futile to speak up, they are less likely to do so.
Factors that determine whether or not an employee feels safe using their upward voice
Research suggests two types of factors that lead people to feel more or less safe speaking up: individual differences and contextual factors.
Individual differences include personality dispositions such as one's level of extraversion or pro-activity, or one's developed skills such as how to communicate in ways that don't evoke defensiveness, and also personal concerns about job security and / or mobility. These factors tend to be seen as applying across situations. For example, a person with greater communication skill might be more likely to speak up despite an unfavorable context.
In contrast, context refers to organizational factors, outside the individual, that provide cues about how voice is likely to be received. Leader behavior is one such contextual cue. Aspects of organizational culture and structure also matter, such as the degree to which an organization is hierarchical or egalitarian, or has explicit mechanisms for inviting upward input (e.g., suggestion boxes, regularly-scheduled meetings, surveys).
Specific features of the situation in which voice is contemplated, such as the size and formality of the venue and level of hierarchy present, also matter, as does the degree of demographic similarity between the speaker and the intended target of his or her communication.
Why are we so hesitant to take the risk and speak up?
The fear of speaking up — and therefore a tendency toward silence — is over-determined by both the general nature of humans and the specific realities of the modern economy. Even from an evolutionary point of view, it seems we're all hard-wired to overestimate rather than underestimate certain types of risk — it was better (for survival) to "flee" too often from threats that weren't really there than to not flee the one time there was a significant risk. So, we've inherited emotional and cognitive mechanisms that motivate us to avoid perceived risks to our psychological and material well-being. As Daniel Goleman2 observes in his seminal work Emotional Intelligence,
One emotional legacy of evolution is the fear that mobilizes us to protect our family from danger. Automatic reactions have become etched in our nervous system because for along and crucial period in human prehistory they made the difference between survival and death.
Turning to the modern economy, most of us depend on hierarchical organizations and their agents (i.e., bosses) to meet many of our basic needs for economic support and human relationships. Thus, fear of offending those above us is both natural and widespread. One way we can get in trouble with those above us is to speak up in ways perceived as challenging of authority or critical of cherished programs. Given the exaggerated and real reasons to fear offending authorities, it isn't surprising that people clam up when the signals seem unfavorable. (Even during our upbringing most of us have grown on the fear of punishment and reward from our parents and teachers.)
How to change a culture so that employees feel more comfortable expressing their opinions?
It's difficult to change a culture of fear. An organization that has fully transformed itself from one of fear to one in which most employees would rate the organization as open or conducive to speaking up, is hard to pin-point. At the same time, there are many organizations that have pockets — groups, departments, work units — that are palpably open and actively engaged in discussion, debate, experimentation, or improvement. Companies in which voice or other learning behaviors are relatively widespread, were founded on principles of respect for all employees, deep commitment to openness, etc. But changing a culture so that people believe speaking up is expected and desired requires some fairly drastic indications of commitment to change. This includes placing individuals who are known to be open in key roles, illustrating in visible ways that voice is celebrated rather than punished, and making fundamental changes to how people get evaluated and rewarded.
In one organization, many employees suggested that "openness to input from below" should become a key component of each leader's 360-degree performance evaluation, and a cut-off score be set for this component, such that those below the threshold could not be promoted. This would have been a fairly radical change in this company, where technical excellence was seen as the primary basis for promotion. Although senior management did not act on this suggestion, which would have been, admittedly, very difficult in their well-established culture, it points in the right direction.
Openness need not be a nice feeling
As Gandhiji tells Munna in Lage Raho Munnabhai, telling the truth requires maximum courage. So does openness. Openness is not about being "nice" or creating a "nice" workplace. In fact, those organizations where voice is more natural and welcome can be pretty tough places in the sense that people are direct! Managers need to hear from the people in the organization who are closest to the work, closest to the customers — that is, from those who are in the best position to recognize problems and have new ideas.
How can managers create a free work environment where employees feel free to express their opinions?
Research has shown that two beliefs are essential preconditions for the free expression of upward voice: first, the belief that one is not putting oneself at significant risk of personal harm (e.g., embarrassment, loss of material resources) and second, the belief that one is not wasting one's time in speaking up. In short, voice must be seen as both safe and worthwhile. Anything an organization can do to prevent the widespread belief that voice is unsafe or not worth your time is likely to increase the upward communication flow.
Environments where risk-taking is championed and visibly rewarded rather than punished, where leaders have good personal as well as technical skills, and where factors that create psychological distance between bosses and subordinates are minimized are likely to be better places for speaking up. Yet, even in such environments people have to speak up to specific individuals, and our research suggests that people can be afraid to speak up to their boss even when the overall organizational climate appears conducive to voice. This makes facilitating voice every manager's job. Expecting a general suggestion system or a semi-annual feedback meeting to take care of the "voice problem" is almost certainly a mistake.
Ultimately, every manager needs to work at being open and accessible and taking action on ideas or reporting back on why action can't or won't be taken. These are behavioral skills that all of us can continue to practice and improve. These don't need to be grand, highly contrived actions. Some people have pointed to immense value in leaders simply stopping by in the cafeteria, or pulling them aside in the hallway for a couple minutes and really listening. This sounds a lot like "management by walking around" but it seems to be worth a lot in this regard.
There are certainly some contextual factors — cultural and structural — that contribute to making larger companies difficult places for speaking up. Size itself is one such factor: People speak up more in smaller groups and in settings that are more intimate. In smaller companies, where everyone knows and regularly interacts with top managers, there is less likelihood employees will be silent based on lack of established relationship or lack of accessibility. Given the physical distance between sites and culture differences that MNCs have to deal with, creating a positive setting for voice can be a serious challenge.
Leadership behaviour is the key
However, bosses can be arrogant or busy or lacking in interpersonal skills in any size or type of company. Similarly, senior management in any type of firm can consciously or unconsciously fail to utilize the formal mechanisms that facilitate speaking up. In fact, much of our research has been conducted in settings that don't fit the descriptions of "large" or "multinational" and yet we have consistently identified the same types of individual differences and contextual factors (especially leader behavior) as key influences on speaking up by subordinates.
The degree to which fear appears to be a feature of modern work life is a startling revelation. A large amount of untapped knowledge goes waste and a lot of pain and frustration results from this silence. People are genuinely hurt and frustrated about their silence. This suggests that employees aren't failing to provide ideas or input because they've "checked out" and just don't care, but because of fear.
Source:
Q&A with Amy C. Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School (HBS), March 20, 2006, HBS by Sarah Jane Gilbert , content developer at HSB’s Baker Library.
Ref:
- Latent Voice Episodes: The Situation-Specific Nature of Speaking up at Work, HBS Working Paper, December 2005, revised June 2006 as Everyday Failures In Organizational Learning: Explaining The High Threshold For Speaking Up At Work, Amy Edmondson and James Detert
- Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman, Bloomsbury,
