Open communication is one of the most repeated values in business.
It is also one of the least reliably experienced.
And the gap usually shows up in the smallest place possible: one conversation with one manager.
Research on employee voice defines voice as discretionary upward communication of ideas, suggestions, concerns, problems, or opinions intended to improve work. When employees withhold that input, they are not just being quiet. They are depriving the organization of useful information it could have acted on.
That is why silence is rarely just an employee problem or a vague culture problem. It is often a learned response to managerial cues. James Detert and Amy Edmondson describe implicit voice theories as taken for granted beliefs about when and why speaking up at work is risky or inappropriate. Once those beliefs take hold, employees do not need to be warned to stay quiet. They start editing themselves before the conversation even begins.
Silence is often explained as fear. Fear matters, but the research points to another driver that is just as operationally dangerous: futility.
Employees are more likely to speak when they believe their input will be heard and acted on. When they expect resistance or dismissal, they are more likely to stay silent, or to move from cooperative voice to more conflictual forms of expression. Recent work on contextual voice efficacy makes that logic explicit, and Morrison’s review notes that employees may remain silent not only because of fear or futility, but also because the social cue of everyone else staying quiet teaches them what is normal.
That matters because silence does not stay neutral. Research reviewed by Morrison suggests that silence is associated with anger, fear, burnout, emotional exhaustion, and lower job satisfaction. When people stop speaking up, the organization does not merely lose comments. It loses learning and increases the conditions that make people detach.
The evidence on managers is unusually direct.
In a two phase study of 3,149 employees and 223 managers, James Detert and Ethan Burris found that management openness was more consistently related to employee voice than transformational leadership. They also found that psychological safety mediated that relationship, which means employees were responding not just to what managers said they valued, but to whether managers made speaking up feel safe. Most striking of all, leadership behaviors had the strongest impact on the voice behavior of the best performing employees. When managers make candor feel risky, they do not just lose marginal input. They can lose the candor of strong performers.
Amy Edmondson’s foundational work points in the same direction. Team psychological safety was associated with learning behavior, and learning behavior mediated the relationship between psychological safety and team performance. Her study also showed that context support and team leader coaching shape these outcomes.
Later evidence reviews reinforce the pattern. A CIPD review summarizing major studies reports that psychological safety is positively related to voice and negatively associated with fear. The same review summarizes Frazier’s meta analysis and notes that psychological safety is positively related to positive leader relations, task performance, information sharing, and learning behavior. Put simply, if managers shape psychological safety, and psychological safety shapes whether people speak, share, and learn, then managers are not adjacent to the problem. They are one of the main mechanisms behind it.
Managers can silence people without meaning to. Usually, they do it through small signals that repeat often enough to become lessons.
The first signal is premature evaluation. Listening research shows that a nonjudgmental listening approach reduces a speaker’s sense of threat and apprehension about being evaluated. That safer atmosphere increases openness, help seeking, and self disclosure. When people feel a listener is not attentive, they become more concerned about negative reactions and avoid sharing their perspectives. A manager does not have to say, “Do not challenge me,” for that message to land. Interrupting too quickly, correcting too fast, or arguing before understanding is often enough.
The second signal is invitation without appreciation. Ingrid Nembhard and Amy Edmondson define leader inclusiveness as words and deeds that invite and appreciate others’ contributions. Their research shows why both parts matter. Without a recognizable invitation, old status boundaries remain in place. Without appreciation, the invitation does not survive contact with hierarchy. Their study found that leader inclusiveness predicts psychological safety and helps overcome the inhibiting effects of status differences. Lee and Dahinten later argued that this kind of inclusiveness is especially important in environments where raising concerns, asking questions, reporting errors, or disagreeing with more senior people is discouraged.
The third signal is futility. Xu Huang and colleagues make the point clearly: when managers demonstrate openness toward voice, employees are more likely to believe voice will make a difference. When managers resist voice or refute suggestions, employees are more likely to see voice as futile. This is why “my door is always open” so often fails. The real issue is not whether the door is technically open. The issue is whether anything useful happens after someone walks through it.
The fourth signal is invisible follow through. McClean, Burris, and Detert found that employee voice was positively related to turnover when managerial characteristics that signaled willingness and ability to engage in change were low. When those managerial characteristics were high, voice was negatively related to turnover. Employees do not just notice whether managers ask for input. They notice whether managers participate in decisions, orient toward change, and have the resources to respond. When voice goes nowhere, some employees stop speaking. Others leave.
If you want a quick audit, ask five questions. Who does the challenging in meetings? Do concerns appear during the meeting or only after it? Do managers ever close the loop? Do newer or lower status employees speak as freely as senior peers? Are your best performers becoming more diplomatic and less candid? Those are not surface clues. They are operational signals that people have learned what speaking up costs.
If silence is taught socially, manager development has to change social behavior, not just add awareness.
Listening research offers a practical model. In a longitudinal study of listening training, participants practiced paraphrasing, reflective responses, open questions, eye contact, open body posture, curiosity, and a nonjudgmental approach. They worked through structured activities built around undivided attention, confidentiality, and reflection. The takeaway is not that every manager needs the exact same course. The takeaway is that the behaviors that make speaking up feel safer are concrete, teachable, and improved through repeated practice.
That has major implications for leadership development. Managers need rehearsal on how to respond when someone raises a risk, questions a decision, or says the current plan is not working. They need feedback on timing, tone, posture, and whether they ask a real follow up question before they evaluate. They need reinforcement on how to close the loop so employees can see that input led to a decision, an explanation, or a change. The evidence points toward repeated, practice based development rather than a single reminder about “being open.”
This is exactly where MATC’s model makes sense.
MATC’s Learning and Development practice covers leadership development and management training and is built to help learners apply what they have learned on the job. MATC’s Interactive Content Development Services include training simulations and interactive workshops. Our Capability Enablement and Operations portfolio includes leadership coaching and learning facilitation, and our Managed Learning Services support ongoing development and updates to training materials, from microlearning to simulations. For a problem that depends on repeated practice, feedback, and sustained reinforcement, that mix is far more useful than another awareness campaign or another slide deck.
Employees do not stop speaking up because they suddenly stop caring. They stop because experience teaches them what candor costs and how little it is likely to change. Managers create that evidence every day.
The good news is that they can change it every day too.
A better speak up culture is not built by asking employees to be braver. It is built by helping managers become safer to speak to. That means teaching managers how to invite challenge, listen without premature judgment, respond with appreciation, and act in ways that prove speaking up matters. It also means supporting those behaviors with coaching, practice environments, and ongoing reinforcement. That is the kind of capability system MATC is positioned to design and sustain.
References
CIPD. *Trust and Psychological Safety: An Evidence Review: Practice Summary and Recommendations.* 2024.
Detert, James R., and Ethan R. Burris. “Leadership Behavior and Employee Voice: Is the Door Really Open?” *Academy of Management Journal*, vol. 50, no. 4, 2007, pp. 869 to 884.
Detert, James R., and Amy C. Edmondson. “Implicit Voice Theories: Taken for Granted Rules of Self Censorship at Work.” *Academy of Management Journal*, vol. 54, no. 3, 2011, pp. 461 to 488.
Edmondson, Amy C. “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.” *Administrative Science Quarterly*, vol. 44, no. 2, 1999, pp. 350 to 383.
Huang, Xu, Adrian Wilkinson, and Michael Barry. “The Role of Contextual Voice Efficacy on Employee Voice and Silence.” *Human Resource Management Journal*, 2023, pp. 1 to 15.
Itzchakov, Guy, Netta Weinstein, Eli Vinokur, and Avinoam Yomtovian. “Communicating for Workplace Connection: A Longitudinal Study of the Outcomes of Listening Training on Teachers’ Autonomy, Psychological Safety, and Relational Climate.” *Psychology in the Schools*, 2023.
Kluger, Avraham N., and Guy Itzchakov. “The Power of Listening at Work.” *Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior*, vol. 9, 2022, pp. 121 to 146.
Lee, Seung Eun, and Vicki S. Dahinten. “Psychological Safety as a Mediator of the Relationship Between Inclusive Leadership and Nurse Voice Behaviors and Error Reporting.” *Journal of Nursing Scholarship*, vol. 53, no. 6, 2021, pp. 737 to 745.
McClean, Elizabeth J., Ethan R. Burris, and James R. Detert. “When Does Voice Lead to Exit? It Depends on Leadership.” *Academy of Management Journal*, vol. 56, no. 2, 2013, pp. 525 to 548.
Morrison, Elizabeth W. “Employee Voice and Silence.” *Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior*, vol. 1, 2014, pp. 173 to 197.
Morrison, Elizabeth W. “Employee Voice and Silence: Taking Stock a Decade Later.” *Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior*, vol. 10, 2023, pp. 79 to 107.
Nembhard, Ingrid M., and Amy C. Edmondson. “Making It Safe: The Effects of Leader Inclusiveness and Professional Status on Psychological Safety and Improvement Efforts in Health Care Teams.” *Journal of Organizational Behaviour*, vol. 27, no. 7, 2006, pp. 941 to 966.