How strategic silence enables employee voice to be valued and rewarded

Abstract

We challenge the predominant viewpoint in the literature that employee silence is inherently harmful. We theorize that employees can engage in strategic silence, or the intentional withholding of untimely ideas or concerns, in order to raise issues that resonate better with managers when they do speak up. More specifically, we propose that employees’ voice is deemed higher quality by managers, and as a result, earns them higher performance evaluations and rewards, when those employees also engage in strategic silence. In a qualitative study (Study 1), we document the dimensions and real-life examples of strategic silence. In two multi-source survey-based field studies (Study 2a and Study 2b) and a pre-registered online experiment (Study 3), we demonstrate support for our theoretical model. Through our findings, we highlight that strategic silence is a functional and useful type of silence that employees use to gain more positive appraisal of their voice from managers.