Silenced by Fear: The Nature, Sources, and Consequences of Fear at Work

Jennifer  Kish Gephart; James R. Detert; Linda K.  Trevino; Amy C. Edmondson

Article | Research in Organizational Behavior | 2009

Silenced by Fear: The Nature, Sources, and Consequences of Fear at Work

by Jennifer Kish Gephart, James R. Detert, Linda K. Trevino and Amy C. Edmondson

Abstract

In every organization, individual members have the potential to speak up about important issues, but a growing body of research suggests that they often remain silent instead, out of fear of negative personal and professional consequences. In this chapter, we draw on research from disciplines ranging from evolutionary psychology to neuroscience, sociology, and anthropology to unpack fear as a discrete emotion and to elucidate its effects on workplace silence. In doing so, we move beyond prior descriptions and categorizations of what employees fear to present a deeper understanding of the nature of fear experiences, where such fears originate, and the different types of employee silence they motivate. Our aim is to introduce new directions for future research on silence as well as to encourage further attention to the powerful and pervasive role of fear across numerous areas of theory and research on organizational behavior.

Keywords: Organizations; Working Conditions; Research; Emotions; Employees; Motivation and Incentives; Theory; Behavior;

Format: Print

31 pages

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Citation:

Kish Gephart, Jennifer, James R. Detert, Linda K. Trevino, and Amy C. Edmondson. "Silenced by Fear: The Nature, Sources, and Consequences of Fear at Work." Research in Organizational Behavior 29 (2009): 163–193.

Today the most promising innovation and business opportunities require collaboration among functions, offices, and organizations. To realize them, companies must break down silos and get people working together across boundaries. But that’s a challenge for many leaders. Employees naturally default to focusing on vertical relationships, and formal restructuring is costly, confusing, and slow. What, then, is the solution? Engaging in four activities that promote horizontal teamwork: (1) developing cultural brokers or employees who excel at connecting across divides; (2) encouraging people to ask questions in an open-ended, unbiased way that genuinely explores others’ thinking; (3) getting people to actively take other points of view; and (4) broadening employees’ vision to include more-distant networks. By supporting these activities, leaders can help employees connect with new pools of expertise and learn from and relate to people who think very differently from them. And when that happens, interface collaboration will become second nature.

Article | Manufacturing & Service Operations Management | Spring 2019

Fluid Teams and Knowledge Retrieval: Scaling Service Operations

Melissa A. Valentine, Tom Fangyun Tan, Bradley R. Staats and Amy C. Edmondson

To scale service operations requires retrieving knowledge across the organization. However, prior work highlights that individuals on the periphery of organizational knowledge networks may struggle to access useful knowledge at work. A knowledge repository has the potential to help peripheral individuals gain access to valuable knowledge because it is universally available and can be used without social interaction. However, for it to successfully serve this equalizing function, those on the periphery of the organizational knowledge networks must actually use it, possibly overcoming barriers to doing so. In this paper, we develop a multilevel model of knowledge retrieval in teams to explore how individuals on the periphery of knowledge networks—because of their inexperience, location, lack of social capital, gender, or role—access knowledge from such a knowledge repository. Unexpectedly, we find that individuals whose experience and position already provide access to vital knowledge use a knowledge repository more frequently than individuals on the organizational periphery. We argue that this occurs because the knowledge repository—despite its appearance of equivalent accessibility—is actually more accessible to central than to peripheral players. Thus, knowledge retrieval is not driven primarily by the need to overcome limited access to other knowledge sources. Rather knowledge retrieval is facilitated when actors know how to reap value from the knowledge repository, which ironically improves with increasing access to other sources of knowledge. We conclude that a knowledge repository is unlikely to scale service operations without additional intervention.

Keywords: teaming; teams; Groups and Teams; Knowledge Management; Service Delivery; Knowledge Use and Leverage;

Citation:

Valentine, Melissa A., Tom Fangyun Tan, Bradley R. Staats, and Amy C. Edmondson. "Fluid Teams and Knowledge Retrieval: Scaling Service Operations." Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 21, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 346–360. View Details

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Silenced by Fear: The Nature, Sources, and Consequences of Fear at Work

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