Abstract
Although employee silence is already well-known to cause harms to both employees and organizations, less is known about the individual and situational factors that can influence it. This study reveals the relationships among acquiescent silence, defensive silence, psychological contract breaches, job-based psychological ownership, voice efficacy, psychological safety and task cohesion. Employing scales with good reliability scores (α between 0.8 to 0.95), we conducted a survey on a sample of of 260 public employees of an Indonesia’s government institution. Analysis indicates that (1) individual factors (voice efficacy and psychological contract breach) and situational factors (task cohesion and psychological safety) work hand in hand to affect silence behavior; and (2) job-based psychological ownership has no relationship with acquiescent and defensive silence. This paper discusses (1) the importance incorporating individual and situational factors in understanding silence behavior; and (2) the collectivistic nature of Indonesian people that may contribute to the importance of situational factor (i.e., task cohesion) on silence behavior well and beyond psychological ownership.
Highlights
The attempt of the chair of Indonesia’s national parliament to secure by gift 20% stake of the world’s most profitable mining companies, which operates in Indonesia, failed because the mining company local Director decided to speak up about it to make sure that public was aware of this move (Mulholland, 2015)
We found moderate negative correlations between acquiescent silence and having idea towards both organization (r= -0.16, p< 0.01) and job (r= -0.20, p< 0.01)
We found that all variables under investigation were significant predictors of acquiescent silence and defensive silence
Summary
The attempt of the chair of Indonesia’s national parliament to secure by gift 20% stake (nearly $US4 billion) of the world’s most profitable mining companies, which operates in Indonesia, failed because the mining company local Director decided to speak up about it to make sure that public was aware of this move (Mulholland, 2015). Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, and its senior internal auditor had cooked WorldCom’s financial report (Akhigbe, Martin, & Whyte, 2005). They chose to remain silent, letting WorldCom to lose a total asset of $US 11 billion and declared bankruptcy with 20.000 employees lost their jobs (Akhigbe et al, 2005). These events are examples to business companies all over the world that apparently silence is not always golden. These cases are only a few of thousands other similar events that tells us how precious the information employees may have and how deadly the silence of employee is, both to company and employees
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
