![]() ![]() This is why you hear stories of people being fired for speaking up about issues that seem pretty important or reasonable. workers are “at will,” meaning they can be fired for nearly any reason – or none at all. In part, this is the nature of working in America today. Asked to explain the gap, I hear the same response that research consistently documents: People are afraid to initiate those conversations. Managers I work with in all sorts of consulting engagements readily admit to a gap between what “should” and “would” be done in situations in which something difficult needs to be said to a boss, a peer or even a subordinate. On the survey that immediately followed my microaggression simulation, for example, more than three times as many participants noticed the first problematic comment than spoke up about it. It’s not, for the most part, that people don’t recognize the problems they could or should respond to. ![]() Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images The four fears ![]() Starbucks workers have unionized over 200 locations in the past year or so. They also contribute to massive employee disengagement and leave a whole lot of people feeling inauthentic and impotent at work – or just regretful over their failures to act. These findings, collectively, demonstrate the significant problems that occur – and are likely to fester – when people stay silent. As for the rest, they react to only about half the microagressions they hear, and typically it’s in the form of helping the victim – “I’ll take the notes” – rather than confronting the remark itself. I instruct the male actor to express at least three microaggressions, such as “Sweetie, you take the notes,” toward his female peer during their short interaction with each student.Ībout half the students – who range in age from about 25 to 50 – never say a peep in response to the offensive comments. During the course, I record individual simulations in which students pitch suggestions for improving an unidentified organization’s diversity and inclusion efforts to two actors playing the role of senior executives. In my “Defining Moments” class, I teach students how to speak up competently in challenging situations. My own small experiment related to this is illustrative. The numbers are similar even when the other person is a colleague who has no power over them.Ĭolleagues who study whistleblowing likewise find that only a fraction of people who see serious wrongdoing take sufficient action to get it stopped, while others have documented how rarely workers say anything when they witness microaggressions. The frequency isn’t much higher when the questions involve speaking up about less thorny issues, such as operational problems or ways to improve the organization. That is, how often do workers speak up when they see a problem or have an improvement or innovation to suggest? In our field, we call the failure to speak up “ organizational silence,” and my colleagues and I found it everywhere we looked in America’s workplaces.Īn online survey I’ve been conducting since 2018 suggests workers stand up to their boss or other higher-ups about illegal, unethical, hurtful or otherwise inappropriate behavior roughly one-third of the time. Workplace courage is actually the main focus of my research. ![]() Put simply, it will take courageous action from not only workers but lawmakers and companies as well. It doesn’t have to be this way but it’s also not easy to change. So in response, they generally either leave or decrease their effort while suffering in silence. Most recently, you’ve probably heard about “ quiet quitting,” an often-misunderstood phrase that can mean either doing your job’s bare minimum or just not striving to overachieve.Īs a management professor who has studied worker behavior for over two decades, I believe these are all reactions to the same problem: Workers are dissatisfied in their current jobs and feel they can’t speak up, whether about organizational problems, unethical behavior or even just to contribute their knowledge and creative ideas. companies, including Starbucks and Apple. That coincided with a flurry of unionizing efforts at major U.S. workers have been at the forefront of three big trends in recent months.įirst there was the “great resignation,” in which record numbers of workers were quitting their jobs. ![]()
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