Organizational Silence, from Roots to Solutions: A Case Study in Iran Petroleum Industry

Organizational silence is defined as the lack of effective interactions among staff and it standsopposite to the concept of organizational voice. In the present research, the purpose is to measure thesilence behavior among the Research Institute of Petroleum Industry (RIPI) staff before and after theimplementation of a comprehensive suggestion system. A suggestion system is an internal structureeasily accessed by all the staff to state their suggestions in a pre-structured format. The roots ofsilence behavior are studied based on a deep literature review to find out possible solutions to improveorganizational voice. To conduct the research, a self-structured questionnaire has been developed anddistributed among all the staff. A quasi-experimental methodology has been adopted to compare pretestand post-test results of silence status before and after implementing the suggestion system. Theresults show that the silence behavior has been meaningfully reduced. This is based on a simple t-testperformed by SPSS software, where there is a meaningful difference between the silence status ofpre-test and post-test. In other words, a suggestion system could be a communication opportunity toencourage staff to provide suggestions and to cooperate for promoting the organization, which willfinally reduce the organization silence. A major gap within the studies of Iranian scholars aboutorganizational silence is the failure to introduce effective solutions to reduce it. However, thisresearch is innovative in the sense that it fills the mentioned gap. This research shows that large scaleorganizations like RIPI need to consider methods like suggestion systems to break bureaucraticobstacles so that their staff can easily find open routes to share their ideas and suggestions in a prestructuredformat. This cooperating will lead to mutual benefits for both parts, since suggestions couldbe used to enhance organizational structure and performance and the staff could also witness theirimpact on organizational improvements.

کلیدواژه ها:

Organizational Silence ، Organizational Voice ، Suggestion System ، Research Institute of Petroleum Industry