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Sammandrag Internationell forskning har visat på en stor geografisk och kulturell spridning av tystnadskulturer och ett genomslag inom hart när alla samhällssektorer. En tystnadskultur innebär att en enskild har kännedom om information som behöver uppmärksammas och ageras på, men denne avstår från att föra kunskapen vidare till de som kan agera på den av rädsla för att ett sådant handlande kan få negativa återverkningar på den enskilde själv. Detta kan medföra att nödvändiga åtgärder inte sätts in i tid vilket i sin tur kan leda till förluster av allt ifrån ekonomiska värden till människoliv. För den enskilde blir följden stress då denne pressas mellan att göra vad som uppfattas som rätt och rädslan för de konsekvenser som antas bli följden. Inom svensk forskning är tystnadskulturer ett närmast oskrivet blad. Två avhandlingar har gjorts men ingen av dessa berör tystnadskulturer i samband med projektarbete. Uppsatser inom ämnet saknas helt. Detta arbete har gjorts för att studera vissa grundläggande förutsättningar. Finns det tystnadskulturer inom svenskt projektarbete och vilka följder kan dessa då få? För att nå svar har vi låtit en rad erfarna projektledare besvara en enkät och denna har sedan följts upp med djupintervjuer av utvalda respondenter. Resultatet pekar tydligt på att det även inom svenskt projektarbete förekommer tystnadskulturer och att dessa, om än mindre tydligt, kan få följder i form av kostnader och skador i linje med vad som visats i internationell forskning. / Abstract International research has shown that employee/organizational silence is culturally and geographically widely spread and has an impact on virtually every part of our society. Employee/organizational silence is when an individual has knowledge of information that needs to be acted upon but he/she refrains from passing it on to those in a position to act due to fear of adverse repercussions should he/she choose to do so. This entails that necessary measures will not be administered in time which may lead to anything between financial losses to the loss of human lives. This will result in stress for the individual pressed between a wish to do what is considered right and the fear of the consequences that is assumed to follow. In Swedish research hardly anything has been done on employee/organizational silence. Two theses have been written on the subject. No essays are registered. This work has been done to study some basic conditions. Is there employee/organizational silence in Swedish project work and if so what are the consequences? To be able to answer these questions we have made an inquiry among a group of experienced Swedish project managers and the inquiry has then been followed by in depth interviews with a select group of respondents. The result shows clearly that employee/organizational silence exists in Swedish project work and that it, although less clearly, comes with the same range of losses as shown by international research.

In a workplace, fostering a culture of transparency, openness, and conflict resolution can create an environment where employees feel comfortable expressing criticism. The purpose of this study is to investigate how employees at a governmental organization perceive the space to voice criticism internally within the workplace. For example, previous research shows that depending on the nature of the criticism employees will consider the pros and cons before presenting it. Previous research also shows that when employees perceive that their voice is limited, they may respond by remaining silent despite management asking for open discussions. To answer the purpose of this study, a qualitative interview study has been carried out consisting of interviews with six state-employed individuals at a Swedish authority. The interviews have been recorded, transcribed and the generated data has been the basis for a thematic analysis. The empirical work has been analyzed based on Habermas theory of communicative action. The study's results show, among other things, that employees who perceive that the manager listens actively, and prioritizes what the employee wants to express, experience a positive space for criticism. Furthermore, the study shows that employees are less inclined to express criticism again if the manager has diminished previously expressed criticism, and that this nurtures the perception of a limited space for criticism. Additionally, the findings show employees perceive they can influence the reception of their criticism by considering how it is expressed. Employees seem to feel that it is more important for them to be listened to, than that the expressed criticism leads to an actual change. / Att ha högt i tak på en arbetsplats kan exempelvis innebära en transparens, en öppenhet, en strävan efter konfliktlösning samt att önskemål och missförstånd kan diskuteras. Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur anställda på en statlig organisation upplever utrymmet att framföra kritik internt på arbetsplatsen. Tidigare forskning visar exempelvis att beroende på vad kritiken handlar om överväger anställda för och nackdelar med att framföra den, samt att när anställda uppfattar att deras röst är begränsad kan de svara genom att vara tysta trots att ledningen efterfrågar öppna diskussioner. För att besvara syftet har en kvalitativ intervjustudie genomförts bestående av sex statligt anställda individer på en svensk myndighet. Intervjuerna har spelats in, transkriberats och det genererade datamaterialet har legat till grund för en tematisk analys. Empirin har analyserats utifrån Habermas teori om kommunikativt handlande. Studiens resultat visar bland annat att anställda som uppfattar att chefen lyssnar aktivt, samt prioriterar vad den anställde vill framföra, upplever ett positivt kritikutrymme. Vidare visar studien att anställda är mindre benägna att framföra kritik igen om chefen har förminskat tidigare framförd kritik, samt att detta bidrar till en upplevelse av ett begränsat kritikutrymme. I studien belyses även att anställda uppfattar att de kan påverka mottagandet av kritiken genom att överväga hur den uttrycks. Anställda tycks känna att det är viktigare för dem att bli lyssnade på, än att den framförda kritiken leder till en faktisk förändring.

Employee voice and silence refer to sharing vs. withholding organizationally relevant input at work. On the one hand, the efficient flow of information in the form of new ideas and suggestions, but also insights about inefficacies, conflicts, incompetence or injustice, are central for organizations to make decisions, implement changes, and improve functioning. On the other hand, speaking up about issues is a primary option for individual employees to shape and improve their own working conditions and environment. Despite these potential benefits on both levels, employees frequently prefer to hold back their thoughts, e.g. due to resignation about the lack of responses following earlier attempts to speak up, or due to fear of negative consequences like embarrassment, retaliation, or social exclusion for sharing criticism or diverging opinions. The two overarching questions within voice and silence research concern the emergence of voice and silence, and their consequences for employees and organizations. Studies set in real organizations often rely on measures of employees’ general tendencies of voice and silence behavior across many situations when trying to answer these questions (person-level studies), which results in several conceptual and methodological weaknesses. In Chapter 1, I describe these weaknesses of person-level voice and silence studies: By definition, voice and silence require relevant input that could be shared or withheld, but person-level studies rarely measure whether employees actually had relevant input to share. Drawing on Event System Theory, I propose to tie voice and silence to preceding workplace events that provide new input or make already present issues salient again so that employees start to consider speaking up or remaining silent. Studying individual events as the smallest building block for voice and silence research ensures that input was present, and avoids aggregating important details about very different situations into a general tendency of behavior. Chapter 2 supports these theoretical and conceptual thrusts empirically by examining two of the few existing datasets about person-level employee silence that also measured the presence of preceding events. Here, events to remain silent about were quite rare and could not be taken for granted. Furthermore, employees answered questions about silence behavior despite stating that they encountered no issues to remain silent about, highlighting the ambiguity of person-level studies and measures. Lastly, I demonstrated the confounding nature of the events that precede voice and silence -- if employees were exposed to e.g. inefficacies, conflicts or injustice, it is unclear if silence-outcome relations reflect the effects of these preceding events or the effects of remaining silent about them (or both). Two studies (an analysis of employee survey data from a German utility company and a simulation) highlight that this confounding influence biases the silence-outcome relationship upwards, marking existing findings about the consequences of voice and silence from person-level studies without control for event effects as potentially unreliable. Chapter 3 builds on these insights to establish the foundation for an event-level perspective on voice and silence. Behaviorally, I defined voice and silence as a continuum of shared information in reaction to a workplace event, and also added the cognitive aspect of feeling torn between speaking up vs. remaining silent. Then, I extended an existing expected-utility-based decision-making framework to incorporate a large number of known predictors of voice and silence in the form of event-related subjective expectancies and values. In two studies (a vignette study and an examination of actual recalled events), I demonstrated that the intention to speak and the amount of shared information after an event can be explained partially by the expected utility of voice and silence across multiple dimensions like the chance of success, or fear of negative consequences. Furthermore, the experienced conflict between voice and silence was related to an unclear intention to speak up. In Chapter 4, I examined the consequences of voice and silence from an event-based perspective. Drawing on Event System Theory and various theories about e.g. strain, affect, and sense-making or impression formation, I postulated different forms of event-induced outcome trajectories (temporary changes in dynamic, state-like outcomes like affect or strain vs. relatively stable changes of evaluative outcomes like perceived organizational justice or relationship quality). Voice and silence were posited to modulate these trajectories over time, e.g. due to feeling an inherently aversive conflict between voice and silence, or due to continued rumination about withheld information. In two studies where participants drew trajectories in an app I developed to describe changes in outcomes, results were variable and nuanced. The experienced conflict between voice and silence had the most consistent associations with outcomes like increased exhaustion or negative affect, whereas sharing more or less information following the event was rarely related to either strain and affect or to evaluative outcomes like organizational justice perceptions. I brought all these findings together in Chapter 5 and discussed their implications for voice and silence research, and the impact for practitioners as well. In sum, person-level examinations of voice and silence require better control strategies to ensure that employees actually have relevant input to share, and to control for the independent effects of events. Despite being a much more extensive change, I also argue in favor of switching the basic level of analysis and theorizing to individual events. In this way, the relationship between voice and silence can be defined more clearly, situational characteristics and variability can be included when studying the emergence of voice and silence, and the complex interplay of event effects and voice/silence-related mechanisms can be disentangled when studying the outcomes of voice and silence. Further research is needed to clarify the relative importance of event effects and voice/silence mechanisms, and therefore where practitioners should begin when implementing interventions.:Zusammenfassung Abstract Table of Contents List of Figures List of Tables Introduction: The Importance of Employee Voice and Silence for Organizations and Individual Employees Chapter 1: Establishing the Need for an Event-Level Perspective on Employee Voice and Silence An Overview of Voice and Silence Perspectives and Levels of Analysis Workplace Events as the Source of Input That Could be Shared or Withheld The Goldilocks Principle for the Interpretability of Voice and Silence Measures: Why a Single Event Is “Just Right” as the Basic Unit of Analysis The Confounding of Event and Voice/Silence Effects: Why Research About the Consequences of Voice and Silence Is Biased Without an Event Perspective Chapter 1 Summary and Conclusion Chapter 2: Providing Empirical Support for the Claimed Ambiguous Measures and Unaccounted Event Effects Using Examples From Person-Level Silence Research Abstract Study 1: Ambiguous Response Patterns in Silence Measures Without Event Information Study 2: Demonstrating Biased Silence Effects When Event Effects Are Not Controlled Study 3: Investigating the Generalizability of Bias in Person-Level Silence Studies Chapter 2 General discussion Chapter 2 Summary and Conclusion Chapter 3: Establishing an Event-Level Decision-Making Perspective on the Emergence of Employee Voice and Silence Abstract Defining Voice, Silence, and Their Relationship on the Event Level and Beyond What Event-Level Voice and Silence Are Not: Lessons From the Workplace Aggression Literature, Industrial Relations and Human Resources Management A Framework to Explain the Event-Level Decision Between Voice and Silence Study 4: Student’s Intention to Speak Up About Questionable Research Practices (QRP) . 97 Study 5: Predicting the Amount of Shared Information in Reaction to Recalled Workplace Events Chapter 3 General Discussion Chapter 3 Theoretical Implications Chapter 3 Practical Implications Chapter 3 Summary and Conclusion Chapter 4: Disentangling the Effects of Employee Voice, Silence, and Preceding Workplace Events Through a Trajectory Approach Abstract Viewing Independent Event Effects as the Baseline That Can Be Shaped by Voice and Silence Incorporating Voice and Silence Effects Into Event-Induced Outcome Trajectories Study 6: Outcome Trajectories After Encountering a Hypothetical Case of Questionable Research Practices (QRP) Study 7: Outcome Trajectories Following Recalled Workplace Events Chapter 4 General Discussion Chapter 4 Summary and Conclusion Chapter 5: Overall Discussion of Event-Level Voice and Silence Research Taking Stock of the Voice and Silence Literature: How Robust Is Our Knowledge? The Relationship Between Voice, Silence, and Other Information-Sharing Concepts Integrating Event-Level Research With Higher Levels of Analysis Through a Multilevel Perspective Encountering Multiple Events and Voice Opportunities Over Time Implications for Research Outside of the Domain of Work-Related Communication Implications for Practitioners Conclusion References Selbstständigkeitserklärung