Staying silent about safety issues: Conceptualizing and measuring safety silence motives

This paper ran three studies to measure the motives behind safety silence and then developed and tested a survey tool to assess these motives in the workplace.

Employee silence is described as “a lack of upward communication regarding concerns, ideas, or opinions relating to the improvement of organizational functioning” (p144), or essentially the reluctance of employees not raising safety-related issues to their supervisors or others in the workplace.

Silence includes issues related to company policies or practices, harassment and more. One study found the top three reasons for employee silence being:

1) fear of being viewed negatively

2) feeling as though they didn’t have enough experience or tenure to speak up, and

3) considering their organisation to have “an intimidating hierarchical structure and/or an unsupportive climate” (p145).

The relationship with upward voice/safety silence in the context of safety communication is briefly covered.

Safety communication can be defined as “the degree to which employees are open to speaking to their supervisors about safety-related issues, opinions, and concerns, and perceive their supervisors as encouraging and accepting of employees’ suggestions for improving workplace safety” (p145).

While safety communication is important, it’s noted that having a high safety communication element doesn’t necessarily indicate a lack of silence, since “employees may have generally positive attitudes and perceptions towards safety communication, but may fail to actually communicate safety-related ideas and concerns based on several underlying motives” (p145).

As said earlier, this paper had three separate studies – I’ve focused mostly on study 1 which outlined the underlying motives for silence based on interviews, and provided only a few key points from studies 2 and 3 (which tested a survey developed for measuring safety silence).

Results

Based on the data, six motives were found behind safety silence behaviour:

·????????Self-based

·????????Other-based

·????????Relationship-based

·????????Climate-based

·????????Issue-based

·????????Job-based

These will be covered in order.

Motives:

Self-based – 20% of critical incidents contained a self-based safety silence component. Self-based indicates how speaking up could affect oneself or others’ perceptions of oneself.

That is, people remained silent if they felt that speaking up could lead to negative repercussions for them, like their supervisor developing a negative image of them or co-workers believing them to be a tattletale for speaking up.

Other-based – this related to silence based on sympathy towards others or how speaking up could affect others in the workplace and included 15% of cases, e.g. speaking up could get a co-worker fired for being involved.

Other-based includes reasons like staying silent to prevent disputes with others, hurt a co-worker’s feelings or put them under pressure.

Relationship-based – this was found in 10% of cases and refers to silence due to how speaking up may affect one’s relationship with others, e.g. silence out of fear of creating tension or a dispute with another. Here, silence was also implicated if it helped prevent creating a difficult working relationship with co-workers and the like.

Climate-based – this accounted for 20% of responses. Climate-based included cases of staying silent in relation to organisational climate, norms, managerial actions and support, communication channels within the organisation and the like.

For example, an employee may stay silent about a safety issue because employees conventionally don’t speak up about such issues. They may also stay silent if they feel that supervisors aren’t open to hearing about the issues or the organisation doesn’t make resolving safety issues a priority.

Issue-based – this accounted for 39% of cases. This motive involved the actual or potential severity of the issue, or the outcome and how it may affect people. For instance if people think that an issue doesn’t put people at risk then they may not report it.

Job-based – this accounted for 24% of cases and refers to silence because of job characteristics, e.g. job design, job duties, job responsibilities. People may not speak up due to time pressures or workload or not speak up if it’s not in their job description (and thus not their responsibility).

In discussing study 1, it’s noted that issue-based safety silence motives were the most numerous examples of silence. This indicates that in this sample, most frequent factors of silence was that people believed the issues or the outcomes to not be severe enough to warrant raising them.

Relationship-based factors were the least cited as motives of silence. This indicates that in this sample, creating tensions between relationships wasn’t a strong factor in people remaining silent.

Next the authors cover studies 2 and 3 which created a safety silence survey and then tested it in a sample of workers. I’ve skipped most of this.

The six motive categories were condensed to four: relationship-based, climate-based, issue-based, and job-based safety silence.

All four safety silence motive categories were found to have significant relationships with employee silence, perceptions of safety climate, safety communication, safety performance and safety knowledge.

Relationship-based and issue-based were the only two categories to be significantly related to safety motivation.

Climate-based had the strongest relationships with perceptions of safety climate and safety communication.

Interestingly, these findings indicated that safety silence motives “explain incremental variance in safety performance above and beyond several well-established variables in the safety literature”, and job-based silence in particular was found to explain unique variance in safety performance.

This suggests that measuring and monitoring safety silence measures could help organisations tap into new streams of intel that fall outside of many existing and common measurement techniques (climate and the like).

Refer to the paper to see the questions used in the silence survey.

Link in comments.

Authors: Manapragada, A., & Bruk-Lee, V. (2016). Accident Analysis & Prevention, 91, 144-156.