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 stands opposite to the concept of organizational voice. In the present research, the purpose is to measure the silence behavior among the Research Institute of Petroleum Industry (RIPI) staff before and after the implementation of a comprehensive suggestion system. A suggestion system is an internal structure easily accessed by all the staff to state their suggestions in a pre-structured format. The roots of silence behavior are studied based on a deep literature review to find out possible solutions to improve organizational voice. To conduct the research, a self-structured questionnaire has been developed and distributed among all the staff. A quasi-experimental methodology has been adopted to compare pretest and post-test results of silence status before and after implementing the suggestion system. The results show that the silence behavior has been meaningfully reduced. This is based on a simple t-test performed by SPSS software, where there is a meaningful difference between the silence status of pre-test and post-test. In other words, a suggestion system could be a communication opportunity to encourage staff to provide suggestions and to cooperate for promoting the organization, which will finally reduce the organization silence. A major gap within the studies of Iranian scholars about organizational silence is the failure to introduce effective solutions to reduce it. However, this research is innovative in the sense that it fills the mentioned gap. This research shows that large scale organizations like RIPI need to consider methods like suggestion systems to break bureaucratic obstacles so that their staff can easily find open routes to share their ideas and suggestions in a prestructured format. This cooperating will lead to mutual benefits for both parts, since suggestions could be used to enhance organizational structure and performance and the staff could also witness their impact on organizational improvements.