U.S. workers have been at the forefront of three big trends in recent months.
October 12, 2022
U.S. workers have been at the forefront of three big trends in recent months.
First there was the «great resignation,» in which record numbers of workers were quitting their jobs. That coincided with a flurry of unionizing efforts at major U.S. companies, including Starbucks and Apple. Most recently, you’ve probably heard about «quiet quitting,» an often-misunderstood phrase that can mean either doing your job’s bare minimum or just not striving to overachieve.
As a management professor who has studied worker behavior for over two decades, I believe these are all reactions to the same problem: Workers are dissatisfied in their current jobs and feel they can’t speak up, whether about organizational problems, unethical behavior or even just to contribute their knowledge and creative ideas. So in response, they generally either leave or decrease their effort while suffering in silence.
It doesn’t have to be this way; but it’s also not easy to change. Put simply, it will take courageous action from not only workers but lawmakers and companies as well.
The problem of ‘organizational silence’
Workplace courage is actually the main focus of my research. That is, how often do workers speak up when they see a problem or have an improvement or innovation to suggest? In our field, we call the failure to speak up «organizational silence,» and my colleagues and I found it everywhere we looked in America’s workplaces.
An online survey I’ve been conducting since 2018 suggests workers stand up to their boss or other higher-ups about illegal, unethical, hurtful or otherwise inappropriate behavior roughly one-third of the time. The frequency isn’t much higher when the questions involve speaking up about less thorny issues, such as operational problems or ways to improve the organization. The numbers are similar even when the other person is a colleague who has no power over them.
Colleagues who study whistleblowing likewise find that only a fraction of people who see serious wrongdoing take sufficient action to get it stopped, while others have documented how rarely workers say anything when they witness microaggressions.
My own small experiment related to this is illustrative. In my «Defining Moments» class, I teach students how to speak up competently in challenging situations. During the course, I record individual simulations in which students pitch suggestions for improving an unidentified organization’s diversity and inclusion efforts to two actors playing the role of senior executives.
