Analyzing the Relation Between Teachers’ Organizational Silence Perception and Whistle Blowing Perception

Abstract

The current highly competitive market where generation of information has exceeded classical production approach, requires much more participation of employees’ to organizational processes, actions and decisions. It is expected to have higher information sharing and coordination among employees as a result of applications of modern management. However, for various reasons, it is observed that employees remain indifferent or silent vis-à-vis their organizations. That silence prevents emergence of new ideas, synergy and creativity at an organization. Improvement of the organization and its adaptation to changing conditions at highly competitive environment depends on employees’ opportunities to present their knowledge, wishes and suggestions about the organization's change and improvement freely and also on existence of convenient organizational environment. This situation can be described as organizational sound. At the presence of inconvenient organizational environment, organizational silence will be present. In order to avoid negative effects of organizational silence, the concept of “whistle blowing” has being used at the literature as one of the tools since 1990s. The main purpose of this study is to analyze the relation between organizational silence and whistle blowing among the teachers who work at primary and secondary schools. Therefore, the differences between the teachers’ organizational silence and whistle blowing perceptions and their gender, age and years of experience as teachers are examined.