Organizational silence: A survey on employees working in a telecommunication company

How to break silence culture and establish a free climate to encourage employees' voice are big challenges faced to mangers. This study is to research the interactions between managers and employees and focus on employees' negative psychological state when organization silence occurs. In this sense, questionnaires were applied a mobile communication company in China, 444 pairs of questionnaires were delivered and 314 pairs of usable responses of were taken. Questionnaire data was analyzed, and according to the results our presumption is fully supported. Different leadership style has different effect on employees' inside feeling and negative psychological state is prone to withholding opinions in organization context. Adopting hierarchical multiple regression, we completely testify that negative psychological state is a mediator between participative leadership behaviors, information-sharing leadership behavior and employee silence. The results of Path Analysis also show the causal relationship of all the predicted variables.