Is Silence Golden In Political Workplace? The Dual Effects Of Silence On Career Success In China

Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Current Psychology

Publication Date

10-9-2024

Abstract

While a growing body of employee silence research has confirmed the damaging effects of withholding opinions and concerns about organizational matters on organizational performance, little progress has been made in interpreting the motives as to why individuals so often remain silent, i.e., what are the beneficial effects of being quiet for individuals at workplace. Moreover, a limited number of studies on the effects of silence got conflicting results. To fill this void, we proposed a contingent model from the Fit theory perspective to examine the dual effects of two types of silence behavior on objective and subjective career success in various political contexts. Analysis with 385 pairs of multi-source data collected over two time periods from 37 companies in China found: in the high political environment, acquiescent silence leads to subjective career success positively and objective success negatively, while defensive silence leads to subjective success negatively and objective success positively. On the contrary, in the low political environment, acquiescent silence leads to subjective success negatively and objective success positively, while defensive silence leads to subjective success positively and objective success negatively. That is, taking different forms of silence in different political environments will have opposite effects on different types of success. Implications for practice and research on silence, success, and Fit theory are discussed.

ISSN

1046-1310

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Disciplines

Business

Keywords

Silence, Perceptions of organizational politics, Career success

Indexed in Scopus

no

Open Access

no

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