Organizational Dissent Scale: Map Where Disagreement Goes

Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 214

The dissent did not disappear

Distinguish upward, lateral, and displaced expression without confusing reported routes with loyalty, openness, or voice effectiveness

Premise

Organizational dissent becomes actionable only when its audience is visible. Jeffrey W. Kassing’s Organizational Dissent Scale measures where employees report directing disagreement about policies and practices: upward toward supervisors or management, laterally toward coworkers, or outside the organization toward family and nonwork friends.

For executives, this shifts diagnosis from whether employees “speak up” to where disagreement travels. Two organizations may contain similar concerns but route them differently. The scale can reveal an expression pattern worth explaining. It does not establish whether the concern is correct, management is receptive, or the chosen route is effective.

The essential model

Kassing’s 1997 model treated dissent as expressed disagreement following perceived incongruence between actual and desired conditions. The 1998 development translated this into audience-specific self-report. In a major field test, 776 questionnaires went to two organizations and 195 usable responses informed factor analysis. Twenty-seven candidates yielded 20 scored items: nine articulated, five latent, and six displaced.

Four additional latent items were printed for future development, creating later confusion about a “24-item original.” A 2000 revision used 18 items for articulated and latent dissent and omitted displaced dissent while strengthening the latent dimension. That form focuses on expression inside the organization. It is not merely a shorter equivalent of the three-route version; users must identify the exact item set and construct coverage.

Why this matters

Imagine a confidential survey using the revised form that finds high latent dissent and lower articulated dissent. Interviews show employees discuss scheduling and safety concerns with peers but do not know which decisions supervisors can change. Calling them negative or unwilling to speak would miss the routing problem.

The organization can instead examine escalation paths, meeting design, retaliation fears, supervisory response, and visible follow-through. If upward dissent later increases, that indicates changed reported routing. It does not prove better decisions, greater psychological safety, or that an intervention caused the change. Incidents, manager and peer accounts, channel data, and consequences remain necessary.

Risks and limits

Self-reported likelihood is not an observational count of who challenged whom, how often, or with what effect. A 2013 study of 291 participants found the scale usable in self, colleague, and outsider reports, but social-desirability tendencies and self–other discrepancies remained. Those differences can reveal that participants do not perceive the same communication act in the same way.

The ODS is not a loyalty, courage, whistleblowing, climate, correctness, or effectiveness score, and it supplies no universal cutoff or best route. Preserve one published version, response scale, and scoring direction; protect respondents because dissent is career-sensitive; avoid identifying small groups; document translations; and confirm permission before commercial reproduction, alteration, or platform integration.

Executive takeaway

Use the Organizational Dissent Scale to map the audiences that receive reported disagreement. Choose the three-route or internal two-route version according to the question, then investigate triggers, channels, power, response, and follow-through. The instrument can show where dissent goes; it cannot decide whether employees, managers, or the organization are right.

Key questions

• Does the research question require upward, lateral, and displaced dissent or only internal routes?
• Which exact item set and version produced the reported subscale scores?
• What explains disagreement being routed to peers or outsiders rather than decision makers?
• What incident, channel, manager, peer, and consequence evidence is needed before judging the pattern?

Selected sources

• Kassing, J. W. (1997). Articulating, antagonizing, and displacing: A model of employee dissent. Communication Studies, 48(4), 311–332.
• Kassing, J. W. (1998). Development and validation of the Organizational Dissent Scale. Management Communication Quarterly, 12(2), 183–229.
• Croucher, S. M., Kassing, J. W., & Diers-Lawson, A. R. (2013). Accuracy, coherence, and discrepancy in self- and other-reports: Moving toward an interactive perspective of organizational dissent. Management Communication Quarterly, 27(3), 425–442.