Making Sense of Organizational Members’ Silence: A Sensemaking-Resource Model

This study presents a sensemaking-resource model of employee silence. Working adults (N = 180) provided retrospective accounts of a decision to refrain from giving upward negative feedback. Constant comparative analysis revealed workers justified their silence as a reasonable course of action by drawing on 2 sensemaking resources: expectation and identity. Emanating from these resources, participants gave 5 reasons for remaining silent: (a) predicting harm to themselves, (b) constructing the supervisor as responsible, (c) questioning their own expertise, (d) predicting supervisors’ deafness, and (e) constructing timing as inopportune. The study concludes with implications for organizational silence research.