There is an immense store of knowledge in organizations that is untapped.  It is the knowledge employees have about how to improve the processes they use to do their work – knowledge they hold but choose not to speak up about. Certainly employees have used their knowledge to make improvements thorough planned initiatives like quality improvement teams or six sigma. But these are the tip of the iceberg in terms of the knowledge that remains unspoken.  

Chris Argyris, the well known Organizational Behavior Professor at Harvard, tells a story that illustrates this point. Argyris was invited to a quality improvement celebration in a large organization. During the evening the successful improvement teams, made up of frontline workers, stood up one by one to tout the savings they had achieved through their projects. The savings were indeed considerable and worthy of celebration. When the teams had all been applauded, the President of the company asked Argyris to comment on what he had heard. Now, Argyris was noted for never pulling his punches about the truth, so out of consideration for the celebratory nature of the meeting, he suggested to the President that it might be better if he didn’t comment. But the President was insistent, being confident in the outstanding work his teams had done.  So Argyris acquiesced.

Argyris began his comments by asking each team in turn how long they had known how to solve the problem they had just been talking about. The teams’ answers ranged from a year to as long as five years. Argyris then turned to the President and his senior leadership team to ask the same question.  They responded that they had first learned about the problems when the teams were formed six months ago; otherwise they would, of course, have dealt with the problems sooner. Argyris then asked the whole group to puzzle about what was going on in this organization that problems that workers knew how to solve, and that would have saved the organization millions of dollars, were unknown to top management. And moreover, the problems had remained unaddressed for a period of years!  He suggested that this organization had a much more critical problem than any of those the teams had successfully solved; that problem being that something was preventing employees from raising problems and solutions to management.  

Study after study* shows that employees’ withholding improvement suggestions is a ubiquitous problem across organizations.  A recent study by Detert and Edmondson** looked at the issue of speaking up from an employee perspective. They examined the question Argyris put to the celebrating organization, “What prevents employees from speaking up?” 

There are three categories of issues around which employees might have reason to speak up. The most familiar category is whistle blower issues, those related to major illegal or immoral acts. A second category of issues is about employee treatment, such as dissatisfaction over pay or perceived injustice. The third category is routine problems and improvement possibilities where employees could volunteer solutions that would save the organization time and money but choose not to. In this study Detert and Edmondson, looked at the third category – the one that would seem to be the least risky for employees to speak up about. 

Detert and Edmondson suggest that, “While the costs of failure to speak up are obvious in cases involving major accidents or public harm…such events are fortunately rare. Far more widespread… are the human and organizational costs of withheld upward voice about routine problems and improvement possibilities.  Added together, these small, everyday failures have the potential to substantially harm organizational performance, especially when weaknesses in internal processes or changes in the environment go unnoticed.”

Their study revealed some surprising findings:  

1. • The fear of speaking up is not limited to blue-collar workers. Senior managers are as likely to be silent about improvements as are lower level employees.  In fact the higher a person is in the organization the greater the concern about potential loss because of the length of time seniors have already invested in the organization. (Because the fear of speaking up is a problem all levels, in the rest of this article, the term “employee” will refer to all levels.)
   

1. • Reluctance to speak up is not a function of personality or type of person. Rather concern about speaking up appears to be related to the specific conditions the potential speaker faces.  In different situations the same employee might be more or less willing to speak up about the same issue.
   

1. • Employees perceive less risk to speaking up when:
   

2. • Meeting in small groups versus large groups – the concern is about being humiliated in front of a large group of strangers.
   

3. • Meeting with the boss privately rather than in more public meetings  - the concern being to save face for the boss.
   

4. • Giving input to a decision rather than speaking up about a project’s status or problems.
   

5. • The employee has been recently acknowledged for good work – employees assume they have a certain amount of social capital to could draw on that would protect them
   

6. • (The perceived benefit to the organization was not a factor that increased the likelihood of speaking up)
   

1. • Employees perceived increased risk for speaking up when:
   

2. • The reaction of a boss (past or current) to improvement ideas were loud or derogatory.
   

3. • The employee’s sense of dependency on the organization was strong – fear of job loss or poor evaluation
   

4. • The culture seemed to warn against speaking up or made being heard seem unlikely. For example,
   

5. • Well known stories about “speaking up and being gone”  - even when those stories did not refer to one’s own boss
   

6. •  In organizations with a scientific culture, bosses expecting extensive data to support any idea offered
   

7. •  In organizations with a hierarchal culture, bosses giving greater weight to where an idea came from than to its merits
   

As the above illustrate, employees hold a generalized belief that a boss or more senior manager would be unable to receive proactive work-related suggestions as anything but personal criticism. This belief is based on the assumption that those above oneself identify with, or feel ownership for, current practices. So that to suggest improvements is tantamount to being critical of those managers.  Employees hold this assumption as true without any supporting evidence or testing of the assumption - seeing it is simply as a characteristic of bosses.

Faced with an opportunity to offer an improvement, employees weigh two factors:

1. 1. the uncertainty that an improvement, if offered, would be implemented and if implemented  knowing that the organizational gain would be down the road.
   

2. 2.  against more certain and immediate embarrassment or loss from offering the improvement.
   

Given those factors it is clear why the problem of speaking up is so pervasive.   Asking an employee to speak up is to ask them to put the organization’s needs ahead of their own career, while knowing that if they take the risk it may not produce results anyway.

Although the intent of Detert and Edmondson’s study was more to illuminate an understanding of the problem than to identify solutions, there are nevertheless several solutions that the study’s findings suggest:

1. • Bring employees together in small groups to discuss organizational problems rather than in large groups.  When a large group meeting is necessary, start the meeting with employees in pairs, trios or quartets, where they can try out their ideas to gage the support for them, then reconvene as a large group. 
   

1. • Managers actively build the social capital of employees by publicly acknowledging those who have done good work.  Having the assurance of being in good standing reduces the perceived risk that a negative reaction will result in harm to the employee.
   

1. • Counteract the stories that work against speaking up by deliberating creating and making visible stories that convey the success of employees who spoke up under conditions perceived as highly risky. Visibly track the number of successful solutions implemented by employees (see the Un-Town Hall).
   

These are not quick nor sure fire ways to change what are omni-present beliefs about speaking up, yet changing even a few minds could increase the availability of much needed knowledge. And changing enough minds could move the organization toward a tipping point that could change the culture. 

*Milliken, Morrison and Hewlin, 2003; Ryan and Oestrich, 1998, Glauser, 1984; Ashford, 1998; LePine and Van Dyne, 1998; Milliken and Morrison, 2003

**Detert and Edmondson (1996) Everyday Failures In Organizational   Learning: Explaining The High Threshold For Speaking Up At Work

Copyright Nancy M. Dixon 2009