Perceived organizational politics and employee silence: supervisor trust as a moderator

Abstract

Employee silence refers to the intentional withholding of ideas, suggestions and problem issues, based on certain motives, from others who may influence the decision. Several contextual factors of an organization may result in employee silence. The current study tries to find out the relationship between perceived organizational politics, an important contextual factor, with employee silence behavior. This study focuses on the important motives behind employee silence in a context of organizational politics. Also, it investigates whether trust in supervisor could manipulate this relationship or not. The findings suggest a positive relationship between organizational politics and employee silence motives. Moreover, it suggests that employees do withhold information due to relational, diffident, defensive, disengaged, ineffectual and deviant motives in a political environment. Trust in supervisor did not hold for a moderation effect on this relationship. Further, the implications of this research and future directions have been discussed.