A different kind of organizational silence: When individuals fail to recognize a problem exists

After major disasters, significant contributing factors are commonly identified but too often only with hindsight. For individuals to report potential problems before the disaster, three steps need to occur: 1) he or she needs to recognize an event as a risk, problem, or possible wrongdoing, 2) he or she needs to choose to either speak up, neglect the problem, or leave the organization based on an assessment of the benefits and costs of each alternative, and 3) he or she must take action if speaking up is the chosen response. The organizational silence literature focuses mostly on step 2, where the culture of the organization causes individuals to choose to not speak up even when a problem is recognized. In this paper, we focus on step 1: where characteristics of the organization or the particular problem cause individuals to fail to recognize a problem exists. We first examine the 1998 incident at Wallops Flight Facility where an aircraft crashed during an engine water ingestion test. We then describe a series of behavioral lab experiments conducted to demonstrate how different conditions in the situation can influence the participant's ability to recognize increasing risk in a task.