Experimental Study of Organizational Ethical Climate and Employee Silence: Based on the Theory of Psychological Expectations

Abstract

The subject of employee silence has been discussed by lots of academics because of widespread behavior that employees often remain silent when they have some ideas. Drawing on the theory of psychological anticipations, we tested the relationship between organizational ethical climate and different types of employee silence by a situational simulation experiments with 482 participants, and on this basis, we tested the mediation effect of personal sense of power. Our findings suggest that, Caring ethical climate has an negative effect on defensive silence and indifference silence; Instrumental climate has positive predictive effect on three types of employee silence; Personal sense of power full mediated the relationship between Caring climate and defensive silence, instrumental climate and acquiescent silence; partial mediated the influences between caring climate and acquiescent climate, instrumental climate and defensive silence, acquiescent silence.