Withholding relevant information is an active choice made when speaking seems futile or unsafe, not an absence of anything to say.
Morrison and Milliken's 2000 argument is that silence is a collective phenomenon with organisational causes: implicit beliefs that employees are self-interested and that management knows best, reinforced by hierarchy and by how dissent has previously been handled. The consequence is that senior management's information about its own organisation is systematically filtered by the people most affected by it.
In practice
- An executive team confident it has no morale problem is describing what reaches it, not what exists.
- A project everybody privately expects to fail is reported green until the deadline makes silence impossible.
- Standing
- Distinct from the spiral of silence, which concerns public opinion rather than organisational reporting.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- Why organisations learn, harden and decline