Organizational Silence Cultures. A Conceptual Framework and Integrative Review on how They Develop, Manifest, and Persist

Organizational silence (a state in which certain issues are not addressed in an organization) prevents open discussion among employees, hampers error detection and innovation, and contributes to the endurance of inefficacy and toxic work places. Applying a cultural lens, we develop a framework for understanding the environment in which organizational silence occurs. We propose that organizational silence cultures develop if silence deems adequate to solve adaptation problems, that they manifest at three layers in the form of artifacts, shared values and norms, and implicit basic assumptions, and that they persist through the combined operation of withholding, deafness, and censorship. Using an integrative review, we examine the propositions of our framework and show its usefulness to synthesize and advance knowledge. We identified adaptive functions organizational silence fulfils and derived four organizational silence culture types, explain how they manifest at three cultural layers, and how withholding, deafness, and censorship make them persist.