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The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of organizational cynicism on prosocial voice and defensive silence and to verify the mediating role of workplace bullying in these relationships.

A cross-sectional survey design with a sample of 205 individuals was used in this study.

The hypotheses were confirmed as organizational cynicism plays a significant and negative influence on prosocial voice and a significant and positive influence on defensive silence. In addition, workplace bullying partially mediates both relationships.

This study contributes to a deeper understanding of organizational cynicism and workplace bullying influences on prosocial voice and defensive silence. It investigates a relationship that, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, has not been studied yet. It also contributes to the discussion regarding the close relationship between prosocial voice and defensive silence.

It is ironic that in stressful economic times, when new ideas and positive behaviors could be most valuable, employees may not speak up, leading to reduced employee participation, less organizational learning, less innovation and less receptiveness to change. The supervisor is the organization's first line of defense against a culture of silence and towards a culture of openness. The purpose of this paper is to ask what helps supervisors to hear prosocial voice and notice defensive silence.

The authors conducted a cross‐sectional field study of 142 supervisors.

The results indicate that prosocial voice is increased by supervisor tension and trust in employees, while defensive silence is increased by supervisor tension but reduced by unionization of employees and trust in employees. This indicates that, as hypothesized by others, voice and silence are orthogonal and not opposites of the same construct.

The data are measured at one point in time, and further longitudinal study would be helpful to further understand the phenomena.

This research highlights the potential for supervisors in stressful situations to selectively hear voice and silence from employees.

This research also has implications for supervisors who work in a unionized environment. Although seemingly counter‐intuitive, there is a value to employee unionization in terms of either reducing the level of actual defensive silence, or at least reducing supervisors’ perceptions of defensive silence.

The paper adds to our knowledge of prosocial voice and defensive silence by testing supervisors’ perceptions of these constructs during difficult times. It provides valuable empirical insights to a literature dominated by conceptual non‐empirical papers. Limited research on silence might reflect how difficult it is to study such an ambiguous and passive construct as silence (often simply viewed as a lack of speech). The paper contributes also to trust literature by identifying its role in increasing supervisor's perceptions of prosocial voice and reducing perceptions of defensive silence.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of employee silence on performance and turnover intentions. In addition, it seeks to explore the mediating role of burnout in the link between employee silence, and three employee outcomes-supervisor-rated task/contextual performance and self-reported turnover intentions.

Using survey questionnaire design, this paper collected data from 508 telecom engineers and their immediate supervisors and analyzed the result using structural equation modeling (SEM) technique, bootstrapping.

Results reveal that employee silence leads to burnout which results in debilitating employee performance, increase in withdrawal behaviors and turnover intentions; burnout mediates these direct relationships. The findings have implications for organizational behavior (OB) research. Moreover, the study found that silence has more pronounced negative effect on employee performance and positive impact on turnover intentions through mediation of job burnout.

The study helps managers identify the psychological ramifications of defensive silence and the underlying mechanism that connects this to employee outcomes. It also highlights the plausible danger zones in which the employees lose self-expression and show symptoms of exhaustion and cynicism, thus ultimately affecting their performance and withdrawal behaviors.

The current study contributes to employee behavior literature by considering silence as an organizational loss in the backdrop of the COR theory which initiates loss process that leads to further losses in individuals.

Previous studies examined the relationships between trust, organizational commitment and the unitary construct of silence. The authors believe that previous studies’ primary shortcoming is the lack of an understanding of the motives of employees in withholding work related issues when they have a lack of trust in their organization and supervisor and a lack of knowledge regarding the form of silence that impacts more organizational commitment. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of trust in organization and trust in supervisor on acquiescent and defensive silence and examines the effects of acquiescent and defensive silence on organizational commitment.

The study utilized structured equation modeling to analyze data from 753 highly skilled employees in South Korea.

The findings revealed that trust in organization is associated with acquiescent silence; trust in supervisor is related with defensive silence and acquiescent silence demonstrated strong relationship with organizational commitment.

This study is the first to explore the associations between trust in organization and acquiescent silence and the relationships between trust in supervisor and defensive silence. Moreover, our study reports the strong link between acquiescent silence and organizational commitment.

The primary purpose of this article is to develop and test a model of the antecedents and consequences (Cho et al., 2016) of bullying in Korean hotel kitchens.

Cross-sectional survey data were collected from 288 kitchen workers at 12 upscale Korean hotels. Proposed path models were tested using Hayes' (2013) PROCESS syntax in SPSS for mediation and moderated mediation analyses.

The empirical results indicated that an employee's acquiescent silence behavior increases the likelihood of being bullied. As a result, bullied employees are more likely to respond by engaging in a person-related counterproductive work behavior (CWB-P) or in defensive silence out of fear with temporary employees reacting less aggressively compared to regular employees.

Cross-sectional design and self-report data risk common method variance and attributions of causality. Future research should use longitudinal designs to avoid common method bias and make causal inferences. Theoretical and practical implications for kitchen productivity are presented. The study should offer valuable insights for prospective employers to develop on-going training and create a positive working environment within the organization.

While bullying is a widespread and even an epidemic problem for the commercial kitchen environment, research into abusive behavior among chefs has been limited. By utilizing a specific segment of the hospitality industry, this research identified different behavioral aspects of bulling between temporary and regular employees in the commercial kitchen environment.

This study aims to analyze the relationship between toxic leadership and exit, prosocial voice, neglect and defensive silence. Second, this study investigates the mediating role of loyalty in these relationships.

A cross-sectional survey design with a sample of 544 individuals was used in this study.

The results suggested that toxic leadership positively influences exit, defensive silence and neglect and negatively influences prosocial voice. In addition, loyalty was found to be a partial mediator of the studied relationships.

This study addresses different theoretical debates, namely, loyalty as an attitude or behavior and its role in individuals’ responses and the relationship between silence and voice.

Neste estudo, pretendeu-se analisar a relação entre a liderança tóxica e a saída, voz prosocial, negligência e silêncio defensivo. Foi também investigado o papel mediador da lealdade nestas relações.

Foi realizado um estudo transversal com uma amostra de 544 participantes.

Os resultados sugerem que a liderança tóxica influência positivamente a saída, o silêncio defensivo e a negligência. Sugerem também uma influência negativa da liderança tóxica na voz prosocial. Adicionalmente, verificou-se que a lealdade é uma mediadora parcial nestas relações.

Este estudo aborda diferentes debates teóricos, nomeadamente a lealdade como atitude ou comportamento, o seu papel nas respostas dos indivíduos e a relação entre silêncio e voz.

En este estudio, nos proponemos analizar la relación entre el liderazgo tóxico y la salida, la voz prosocial, la negligencia y el silencio defensivo. En segundo lugar, investigamos el papel mediador de la lealtad en estas relaciones.

En este estudio se utilizó un diseño de encuesta transversal con una muestra de 544 individuos.

Los resultados sugirieron que el liderazgo tóxico influye positivamente en la salida, el silencio defensivo y la negligencia e influye negativamente en la voz prosocial. Además, la lealtad resultó ser un mediador parcial de las relaciones estudiadas.

Este estudio aborda diferentes debates teóricos, a saber, la lealtad como actitud o comportamiento y su papel en las respuestas de los individuos y la relación entre silencio y voz.

With a basis in the conservation of resource (COR) theory, this study examines the relationship between workplace ostracism and job performance while also investigating the mediating role of defensive silence and the moderating role of emotional intelligence.

The study uses a multisource, three-wave data collection technique to gather data from employees and their peers working in Pakistan's service sector organizations. Data are analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) (v 3.2.7) to assess the measurement model and the structural model.

The findings reveal that the perception of workplace ostracism provokes self-avoidance strategy, defensive silence, which attenuates job performance. However, defensive silence's mediating role is mitigated if employees can draw from their emotional intelligence ability, which induces a self-regulation mechanism that curbs workplace ostracism's negative consequences.

The study demonstrates how employees in collectivist, high-power distance cultural settings may strategically choose silence by exercising emotional intelligence to enhance job performance.

This study is one of the few efforts that examined defensive silence in non-Western cultural settings. This is also the first study that examined emotional intelligence's role in the proposed moderated mediation framework.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of workplace bullying on employee silence (defensive, relational, and ineffectual silence), and to test the mediating role of psychological contract violation (PCV) in this relationship and the extent to which the mediation is moderated by workplace friendship.

Data were collected from 835 full-time Indian managerial employees working in different Indian organizations.

Results revealed that workplace bullying positively correlated with silence (defensive, relational, and ineffectual silence). The hypothesized moderated mediation condition was supported as results suggest that PCV mediated the bullying-silence relationship and workplace friendship moderated this mediating pathway, i.e. indirect effects of workplace bullying on employee silence via PCV were weaker for employees with high workplace friendship.

A cross-sectional design, use of self-reported questionnaires, and gender-blind perspective to examine bullying are few limitations of this study.

This is the first study examining employee silence in response to workplace bullying and one of the few attempts to examine employees’ passive coping strategies in response to workplace mistreatment. This study is also one of the rare attempts to examine bullying-outcomes relationship in the Indian context.

A well-formulated and effectively implemented anti-bullying policy and management support may encourage employees to combat bullying by raising their voices against it.

This is the first study examining employee silence in response to workplace bullying. This study is also one of the rare attempts to examine bullying-outcomes relationship in the Indian context.

The purpose of this paper is to gain a greater understanding of fear-based information withholding in project-manager-to-project-sponsor (PM2PS) communication and to propose future research directions.

The research consisted of a review of the literature related to the withholding of information in subordinate-to-superior communication and in PM2PS communication. Literature from project communication studies and literature from general communication theory was consulted.

Using defensive silence theory as a conceptual framework, five research propositions specific to fear-based information withholding in PM2PS communication are offered.

The study findings are limited to PM2PS communication based upon fear. The study provides a foundation for further research in this area within the conceptual framework of defensive silence theory.

The practical implication of this paper is that certain perceptions and behaviors of a project sponsor can be related to fear-based information withholding in PM2PS communication.

The originality of this paper is that it extends defensive silence theory into the realm of PM2PS communication. The value of this paper is to provide a catalyst for subsequent empirical-based research in order gain greater insight into fear-based information withholding in PM2PS communication.

A workplace bullying dynamic involving multiple individuals targeting victims can lead to the victim losing emotional bonds or affect-based trust with their colleagues, resulting in employee silence. The literature has largely ignored this negative aspect of social dynamics. This study aims to examine the relationship between workplace bullying and employee silence behaviors and determine whether affect-based trust mediates this relationship and whether climate for conflict management moderates the mediated relationship.

Hypotheses are tested using surveys and scenario-based experiments among faculty members in Indian Universities. There were 597 participants in the survey and 166 in the scenario-based experiment.

Results revealed that workplace bullying correlated positively with silence behaviors, and affect-based trust mediated the bullying-silence relationship. The hypothesized moderated mediation condition was partially supported as moderated the mediating pathway, i.e. indirect effects of workplace bullying on defensive silence and ineffectual silence via affect-based trust were weaker for employees with high climate for conflict management. However, the study failed to support the moderation of climate for conflict management in the relationship between workplace bullying and affect-based trust and workplace bullying and relational silence. The results of this moderated effect of climate for conflict management were similar in both studies.

This study is one of the few attempts to examine employee silence in response to workplace bullying in academia. Additionally, the study revealed a critical area of trust depletion associated with bullying and the importance of employee perceptions of fairness toward their institutions’ dispute resolution processes.