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

Using modeling and computer simulation, this research focuses on studying two different views to organizational design and their implications for performance in the context of academic institutions. One view represents the manifest structure that includes resources (students, faculty, administration, facilities, finances, partners, donors, etc.); the other view represents the latent structure that focuses on dissent. The dissertation addresses the following two questions; 1. What are the tangible dynamic interdependencies constituting the manifest structure within academic institutions and their impact on performance? 2. What is the impact of the latent structures composed of intangible organizational processes, especially dissent, on performance? The dissertation proposes generic system dynamics simulation models untangling the complexity of the topic by tackling various slices of the problem in separate papers. The models are based on three different theoretical frameworks addressing resources and their composition, dissent, and stakeholder engagement. It is observed that while both the manifest and the latent parts of the university organization impact its performance, the latent part, being invisible, is often ignored. In the long run, the influence of the latent part of the organization can slowly but seriously compromise intangible performances components like quality, reputation, and attractiveness. When the manifest part of the organization is dysfunctional, its tangible performance rapidly suffers. The damage control policies will often impact the latent organizational performance leading the institution into a vicious cycle. The presence of time delays in this framework may create an oscillatory behavior that might modulate a growth or decline trend. Performance measures addressing intangible performance components must be factored into the organizational design since faculty, students, and other stakeholders are not only driven by financial rewards, but also by the organizational environment. The research, besides addressing the important question of the role of latent elements in organization design and demonstrating this can be done using system dynamics modeling and computer simulation, should also be of value to the design and management of higher education institutions.

Using modeling and computer simulation, this research focuses on studying two different views to organizational design and their implications for performance in the context of academic institutions. One view represents the manifest structure that includes resources (students, faculty, administration, facilities, finances, partners, donors, etc.); the other view represents the latent structure that focuses on dissent. The dissertation addresses the following two questions; 1. What are the tangible dynamic interdependencies constituting the manifest structure within academic institutions and their impact on performance? 2. What is the impact of the latent structures composed of intangible organizational processes, especially dissent, on performance? The dissertation proposes generic system dynamics simulation models untangling the complexity of the topic by tackling various slices of the problem in separate papers. The models are based on three different theoretical frameworks addressing resources and their composition, dissent, and stakeholder engagement. It is observed that while both the manifest and the latent parts of the university organization impact its performance, the latent part, being invisible, is often ignored. In the long run, the influence of the latent part of the organization can slowly but seriously compromise intangible performances components like quality, reputation, and attractiveness. When the manifest part of the organization is dysfunctional, its tangible performance rapidly suffers. The damage control policies will often impact the latent organizational performance leading the institution into a vicious cycle. The presence of time delays in this framework may create an oscillatory behavior that might modulate a growth or decline trend. Performance measures addressing intangible performance components must be factored into the organizational design since faculty, students, and other stakeholders are not only driven by financial rewards, but also by the organizational environment. The research, besides addressing the important question of the role of latent elements in organization design and demonstrating this can be done using system dynamics modeling and computer simulation, should also be of value to the design and management of higher education institutions.