Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 109
Bad news learns to stay downstairs
Leaders lose corrective intelligence when shared experience teaches employees that speaking up is dangerous or futile
Premise
An organization can possess relevant knowledge and still decide as if that knowledge did not exist. Employees may see operational failures, customer harm, ethical risks, or unrealistic targets yet conclude that raising them is unsafe or pointless. When that conclusion becomes socially shared, the problem is not one reluctant employee. It is an information system that filters out what authority most needs to evaluate.
Elizabeth W. Morrison and Frances J. Milliken’s 2000 formulation of Organizational Silence explains how managerial assumptions, structures, and collective interpretation can suppress upward information even when leaders invite candor. Its executive question is concrete: what conditions teach people that relevant disagreement will bring personal cost or no meaningful response?
What the model is: Organizational Silence in Knowledge →
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- The essential model
- Why this matters
- Risks and limits
- Executive takeaway
- Key questions
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryTheories & Explanatory Models
- DomainVoice, Silence & Power
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Theories & Explanatory Models
Explains how or why a communication process works by relating mechanisms, conditions or variables. Its value is an account that can guide inquiry into what produces an outcome, rather than a name for the outcome alone.
- KnowledgeOrganizational Silence
- Related briefMuted Group Theory: Audit Which Meanings the System Can Hear
- Related briefMUM Effect: Find Where Bad News Loses Its Action Value
- Key conceptEmployee Voice
- Key conceptSilence