Quick summary: Employees often stay silent because raising concerns feels risky or unlikely to change anything, leaving organisations unaware of problems. Leaders can encourage people to speak by taking concerns seriously, inviting specific challenges and explaining what action follows. Greater silence is associated with higher burnout, making effective responses to employee concerns relevant to staff well being as well as safer decisions.
A manager finishes a meeting by saying, “If anyone sees a problem, tell me. My door is always open.” Nobody disagrees. A few days later something goes wrong, and it becomes clear that several people had already been worried about it. The obvious question is why they said nothing.
It is tempting to explain silence through personality, on the theory that employees lacked confidence, should have been more assertive or failed to take responsibility. Sometimes that may be true. Decades of organisational psychology suggest, however, that silence is often more rational than it first appears, because people do not decide whether to speak in a vacuum. They consider what might happen next.
Speaking up carries a social risk
Research on employee voice has repeatedly shown that people weigh possible benefits against interpersonal and professional costs. Employees may believe that raising a concern will make them look difficult, negative, inexperienced or disloyal. They may doubt that anything will change, or they may have learned from earlier interactions that challenging a decision is unwelcome. Elizabeth Morrison and Frances Milliken described this as organisational silence, a collective pattern in which employees withhold information that managers would benefit from hearing.
James Detert and Amy Edmondson described some of the assumptions behind it as “implicit voice theories”, which are largely taken-for-granted beliefs about when speaking up is risky or inappropriate. Their research found that employees can censor constructive suggestions even when those suggestions are intended to help the organisation. Because these beliefs are often formed early in a career and carried from one workplace to the next, they can shape behaviour long before a particular manager has done anything to deserve them. This helps explain why simply asking people to speak up often achieves less than leaders expect.
The employee is deciding whether the information matters, and is also estimating what speaking will cost. A junior employee who spots something a senior manager has missed may have to contradict someone with greater authority. If a project is already behind schedule, reporting another problem may make the employee appear obstructive. If earlier concerns disappeared without action, silence can start to look more sensible than another unsuccessful attempt. Albert Hirschman’s classic framework of exit, voice and loyalty already pointed in this direction, since people who feel their voice makes no difference tend to withdraw instead. From the employee’s perspective, saying nothing can be an adaptation to the environment and carries no implication of indifference.
What psychological safety actually means
This is where psychological safety becomes useful, and also where the concept is often misunderstood. Psychological safety does not mean that people avoid disagreement or that work should always feel comfortable. In Amy Edmondson’s definition it refers to whether people believe they can take interpersonal risks, such as admitting uncertainty, asking for help, reporting a mistake or challenging an idea, without expecting disproportionate social consequences. Her early research in hospitals even found that the teams with the best working relationships reported more medication errors, because they felt safe enough to admit them.
A major review by Edmondson and Derrick Bransby shows that psychological safety has become particularly important in complex, interdependent work, where learning depends on information moving between people. That makes it more than a well-being issue, because it is also an information problem. If an employee notices a weak signal and does not report it, the organisation cannot analyse it. If a nurse is uncertain but feels unable to ask, the team loses information. If an engineer sees a flaw in an assumption but decides that challenging the project lead is too risky, the formal decision process continues with an incomplete picture. The risk is already present in each case, and silence prevents the system from seeing it.
The first response teaches people what to do next time
Leaders sometimes assume that psychological safety can be created by declaring openness. The more important signal is what happens after someone actually disagrees. Suppose an employee questions a plan during a meeting, and the manager becomes defensive, explains why the employee has misunderstood the situation and moves on with the agenda. Nobody was punished or shouted at, and the manager may sincerely believe that disagreement is welcome. The room has still learned something, because the cost of challenging the plan has become more visible and the expected benefit has become smaller.
This kind of learning needs no dramatic retaliation. Eye-rolling, irritation, repeated interruption, dismissive humour or simply ignoring a concern can be enough to change future behaviour, so silence is shaped through repeated small interactions. Chris Argyris wrote about the defensive routines that organisations develop for avoiding embarrassment, and a quick rebuttal from a leader is one of the most common examples. The same mechanism works in the opposite direction. When a leader asks for clarification, thanks someone for raising an uncomfortable issue and explains what will happen next, the group receives evidence that speaking can have value. The response does not need to agree with the concern and only has to treat it seriously enough to examine it.
People also need to believe that speaking will matter
Safety is only part of the picture. An employee may feel perfectly safe criticising a process and still stay silent because experience suggests that nothing will change. Research on employee voice increasingly distinguishes between feeling safe enough to speak and believing that speaking will have an impact, and both matter. A recent review of the voice and silence literature notes that psychological safety is particularly important in reducing silence, while perceived impact plays a central role in encouraging active voice.
This helps explain why suggestion boxes and “speak-up cultures” can fail even when nobody fears direct punishment. Employees eventually notice whether anything happens, and if concerns repeatedly enter the organisation without producing acknowledgement, investigation or feedback, silence becomes a form of learned efficiency. Martin Seligman’s work on learned helplessness describes a similar process, in which repeated experience of having no effect on outcomes leads people to stop trying even when circumstances change. Closing the feedback loop is therefore part of psychological safety. If a concern cannot be acted on, explaining why helps, and so does saying when more information is needed. If the person was mistaken, the evidence can be explained without humiliating them, and if the concern changes the decision, making that visible shows that information travels.
Silence can affect well-being
The consequences extend beyond organisational learning. A systematic review and meta-analysis covering 84 studies and almost 35,000 employees found a significant relationship between burnout and patterns of silence and voice, with greater silence and lower voice associated with higher burnout. The studies cannot show that silence alone causes burnout, and the direction of causality is complex. It makes intuitive sense that repeatedly seeing problems while feeling unable or unwilling to influence them could become psychologically costly. Burned-out employees may also have fewer psychological resources for the additional effort that speaking requires, so the relationship can reinforce itself.
Making it easier for information to move
Leaders who want people to speak up can start with something more concrete than asking them to be brave. Specific questions work better than a general “Any concerns?”, for example “What are we assuming here?”, “What could make this decision fail?”, “What are you seeing that I may not be seeing?” or “If you had to challenge one part of this plan, which would it be?” These questions reduce the social work required from the employee, because disagreement has already been invited. The first uncomfortable answer then deserves particular attention, since that moment teaches the group far more about psychological safety than any statement about an open-door policy.
People should still take responsibility for communicating important concerns. Organisations cannot remove every interpersonal discomfort from professional life, and psychological safety should never become an excuse for avoiding difficult conversations. Even so, telling employees to speak up while leaving the cost of speaking unchanged is unlikely to resolve silence. Leaders who want more information to reach them may find it useful to examine what happens to the person who provides it, and whether experience has taught their teams that speaking is worth it.
Dr Dimitrios Chionis is a military psychologist and human factors specialist in the Hellenic Air Force. He works on risk perception, decision-making under pressure, and safety-critical systems.
