Silent Weak Signals in Port Operations: Ethical Leadership, Psychological Safety and Reporting Climate in Safety‐Critical Terminals

Ports depend on timely upward communication because operational irregularities, weak signals, near misses and procedural drift often appear first at the frontline. Yet employees may withhold concerns when speaking is experienced as futile or relationally unsafe. This study reframes acquiescent silence as a crisis prevention problem and examines whether ethical leadership reduces silence through psychological safety and courage. A sequential explanatory mixed‐method design was used. Survey data were collected from 1415 employees working in Turkish port and terminal organisations, and 42 semi‐structured interviews were conducted to explain the quantitative pattern. Ethical leadership strongly predicted psychological safety and also predicted courage. Psychological safety was the dominant mechanism reducing acquiescent silence, whereas courage showed a smaller and ambiguous direct role. The hypothesised psychological safety–courage interaction was not supported. The qualitative findings explain this pattern by showing that courage is situational and costly, whereas psychological safety defines whether routine upward communication is socially survivable. The paper contributes to crisis management research by showing how acquiescent silence suppresses weak‐signal escalation in safety‐critical operations and by demonstrating why contingency planning frameworks should treat non‐retaliatory communication climates as a structural precondition for operational learning and crisis prevention.