Organizational voice and organizational silence: the evolution of the constructs in international psychology

This article traces the development of two psychological constructs — organizational voice and organizational silence. The article examines how the understanding of each construct changed from the initial conceptualizations of the late 1990s to more recent refinements: what content different authors attributed to voice and silence, how the explanatory focus shifted from individual dispositions to the organizational context, and how the distinction between voice and silence came to be grounded in motivation. We separately address the unresolved question of how the constructs relate to one another — whether they are treated as poles of a single continuum or as relatively independent forms of behavior. Particular attention is given to recent empirical work that has clarified the nonlinearity of the links between voice and its antecedents and has confirmed the empirical autonomy of voice and silence. The practical value of this conceptual reconstruction is equally substantial. Distinguishing between the motives underlying employee voice and information withholding enables more precise diagnosis of barriers to upward communication, assessment of psychological safety, and development of managerial practices that ensure employees’ warnings, concerns, and suggestions receive a substantive response rather than being lost within the organizational hierarchy. Russian psychology has not systematically examined these phenomena; the present work introduces them for the first time.