What big disasters teach us about little catastrophes

“Our research indicates that employees bold enough to point out the uncomfortable facets of an organization can only be expected to do so in an organization that supports them in deed as well as word.” -Keith Credo, PhD

Workplace “disasters” occur along a continuum. Extreme events such as mine collapses, factory fires, and oil rig explosions represent the most deadly kinds of organizational safety failures. They have far-reaching consequences, profoundly impacting human lives as well as the surrounding environment and industries.  On the other end of the spectrum, less spectacular “disasters” manifest in a variety of ways—project failures, botched communication, harassment in the workplace, hostility between management and employees—the list of potential pitfalls is significant.

While not typically headline-grabbing, everyday catastrophes can be more insidious, eating an organization from the inside-out. Erosion of performance and safety amongst management and employees alike can threaten individuals and the organization as a whole. It’s likely that your organization is not on the brink of the next Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, but what can studying such extreme catastrophes tell us about how to avoid them in our everyday operations?

One of the most tragic components of disasters (big and small), is that hindsight often reveals that they could have been prevented. In what has become a tale as old as time, further investigation too often uncovers the frustrating truth: that individuals who reported the impending danger were either ignored or in some cases outright silenced and punished, all with disastrous consequences. Frequently, the blame lies with management or executives who hubristically dismiss employees who try to ring the alarm, or worse, calculate the cost of the lives of their employees to be less valuable than an increase in executive earnings.

What happens when individuals don’t even feel safe to report danger when they recognize it in the first place? A phenomenon well-documented in research, this code of silence was coined the “Mum Effect” (Rossen & Tesser 1972). From reporting threats to personal safety on an assembly line, to delivering bad news about a project’s budget, employees may feel pressured to withhold critical information for fear of reprisal. As a consequence, individuals and organizations suffer.  

So, how to ensure that all individuals feel comfortable providing critical information and sounding the alarm? My colleagues and I conducted research in 2016 that shows it may simply come down to organizational culture.

Our study evaluated individuals working in potentially hazardous or dangerous industries including mining, petrochemical, and manufacturing.  We discovered that employees’ propensity to report dangers/hazards they spot in the workplace was often directly linked to their perceptions of management and company attitudes towards safety. This means individuals are much more likely to sugarcoat or outright withhold information when they have a negative perception of how their organization and management deal with less-than-positive feedback. When surveyed, employees reveal that this is largely because they react to the surrounding organizational culture—whether one that rewards and validates people who are willing to point out potential dangers or pitfalls, or one that punishes or criticizes those who are willing to stand up and tell people what they may not want to hear.

Despite the formal policies set forth by management, the messages of organizational culture may be more subtle- an underlying set of unspoken rules and regulations that govern behavior and signal organizational values. These messages are incredibly powerful, usually magnitudes more powerful than written policies.  Employees’ perceptions of organizational attitudes towards whistleblowers can silence employees or encourage them to speak up, directly influencing the transmitting of important, essential information regarding concerns, big and small.

Organizations that truly want to enlist the help of employees to avoid disasters of both the extreme and the everyday need to be willing to put in the work. It is not enough for management to simply say that they care about safety, or for the code of conduct or policies to include statements that technically protect whistleblowers. Those employees bold enough to point out the uncomfortable facets of an organization can only be expected to do so in an organization that supports them in deed as well as word.  Everything we have learned about unofficial grapevine communication shows us that any scent of management retaliation towards whistleblowers will permeate the entire organization, resulting in employees that don’t speak up even at risk of physical harm to themselves and others, much less monetary loss for the organization.  Our research shows that leaders must to walk the talk in supporting employee reporting … or accept the consequences of employee silence.

Works Cited:

Credo, K. R., Cox, S. S., Matherne III, C. F., & Lanier, P. A. (2016). Can Organizational Practices Inadvertently Silence Potential Whistleblowers?. American Journal of Management, 16(3), 9.

Tesser, A., & Rosen, S. (1972). Similarity of objective fate as a determinant of the reluctance to transmit unpleasant information: The MUM effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 23(1), 46.