Lab Manager | Run Your Lab Like a Business

News

Image of people having a meeting

Have Something to Say? Your Boss May Prefer You Do It in Private

Managers should make sure they are open to hearing what employees have to say in public forums

by
University of Maryland, Robert H. Smith School of Business

At the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, inspired business education is our business. Our faculty is world class. Our research is cutting edge. Our...

ViewFull Profile.
Learn about ourEditorial Policies.
Register for free to listen to this article
Listen with Speechify
0:00
5:00

When employees feel comfortable speaking up at work with new ideas or concerns, it benefits the team and the organization. But some managers want employees to share those thoughts in one-on-one settings—not public meetings—because they want to save face, finds new research coauthored by management professor Subra Tangirala at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

Tangirala worked with Maryland Smith, PhD, Elad N. Sherf, now at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Sofya Isaakyan of Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Hannes Guenter of Maastricht University, on the new research, titled “Keeping It Between Us: Managerial Endorsement of Public Versus Private Voice” in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Get training in Making Difficult Decisions for the Lab and earn CEUs.One of over 25 IACET-accredited courses in the Academy.
Making Difficult Decisions for the Lab Course

Tangirala has extensively studied employee voice and how when employees speak up, it can lead to better problem solving, stronger teams, and innovation.

Employees need to feel like they have forums to speak up, he says. And while doing so at a group meeting might seem like the most effective way to spur immediate engagement with the whole team on a broached subject, managers often don’t like that, find Tangirala and his coauthors.

“When employees speak up publicly, we see that managers are often threatened by it. Managers have this tendency to react negatively to public voice because they feel that they lose control of the conversation and look inept in front of everyone,” says Tangirala.

But this doesn’t mean that managers want employees to keep quiet, he says. “Managers want voice, and voice helps managers—when people speak up, managers can do a lot of positive things. Employees have a lot of good ideas, which can help the team.”

They just psychologically prefer that employees don’t speak truth to power in front of everyone. They would much rather have a closed-door discussion with the employee.

This aversion to public voice is especially strong when it comes from employees who are not that relationally close to the manager.

“This can have a very bad effect on organizations because employees who are not part of ‘in-groups’ of the managers usually only have opportunities to reach the managers in public meetings,” Tangirala says.

If managers respond negatively to those employees when they use public forums, it’s a loss because they will fail to gain access to an outsider perspective that those employees can provide, Tangirala says.

“Managers are actually undercutting their own effectiveness by dismissing ideas that are brought up publicly and only relying on private channels for ideas. That can be detrimental to their effectiveness and can be bad for the team.”

The researchers hope organizations take note of the findings and encourage managers to be open to hearing what employees have to say in public forums without being overly concerned with how it might impact their own image. Managers also need to be aware that their reactions to voice can be shaped by their personal relationships with employees, causing them to miss out on perspectives from people outside their inner circle, Tangirala says. 

And for employees who have something to say? They’ll likely be more successful bringing up their ideas with managers in private, Tangirala says.

- This press release was provided by University of Maryland, Robert H. Smith School of Business