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EMPLOYEE SILENCE AND THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY:
A POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF WORKPLACE DEMOCRACY
Dr Andrew R Timming Reader in Management School of Management University of St Andrews The Gateway, North Haugh St Andrews, KY16 9RJ (art2@st-andrews.ac.uk) Dr Stewart Johnstone Lecturer in HRM Newcastle University Business School Newcastle University Barrack Road Newcastle, NE1 4SE (stewart.johnstone@ncl.ac.uk) 16 December 2013 Acknowledgements: We want to thank the editor and reviewers for helpful suggestions on the manuscript. We also want to thank Matthias Benzer for his advice on Adorno.
Abstract Purpose: Drawing from Adorno et al’s (1950) The Authoritarian Personality , this paper seeks to explain why some workers reject participation in decision-making on principle, preferring instead to defer to managerial authority and remain silent. Approach: The paper reviews the literatures on employee voice and silence and then builds a conceptual framework that can be used to explain employee silence in relation to personality structures. Findings: It is argued that some employees have personality structures that make them more susceptible to anti-democratic thoughts. Potentially fascistic personalities, as measured by the F- scale, are expected to derive pleasure in submission to the will of management. Implications: The paper has implications for political and social psychologists, especially those seeking to understand how best to promote employee voice in the workplace. Originality: This study makes an original contribution to the employee voice and silence literatures by being among the first of its kind to examine the political psychology of fascism in the micro-context of the workplace. KEYWORDS: Authoritarian Personality, Employee Voice, Fascism, F-Scale, Silence ARTICLE CLASSIFICATION: Conceptual Paper
PREVIOUS WORK ON EMPLOYEE VOICE AND SILENCE
Employee Voice Employee participation and involvement in decision-making are well-established areas of research and have attracted interest from a wide range of social science perspectives in recent years. The term employee voice, in particular, has become fashionable in contemporary human resource management. Academic discussions of voice often reflect upon the work of Hirschman (1970: 30) who, in the context of consumer relationships, contrasted ‘voice’ with ‘exit’, or ‘suffering in silence’. Similarly, LePine and Van Dyne (1998: 853) define voice as ‘speaking out and challenging the status quo with the intent of improving the situation’. However, employee voice can potentially also be in favour of the status quo and in support of existing organisational practices (Burris et al, 2012). Universally acceptable definitions of voice thus remain elusive, and the relationship with related terms such as participation remains blurred (Budd et al, 2010). In a recent attempt to synthesise a wide range of disparate definitions, Morrison (2011) suggests that voice is normally used to refer to verbal dialogue which is upward, constructive, proactive and discretionary in nature. Whilst this might fit within the context of a mainstream HRM conceptualisation of voice, interest in the expression of voice far precedes the relatively recent birth of human resources. Employee involvement in decision-making has been discussed in the management literature since at least the 1930s (Handel and Levine, 2004), and the participation of employees in organisational decisions has always been a core concern of the industrial relations field (Webb and Webb, 1902). However, despite the wealth of research on the topic, scholars’ understanding of employee voice is still hindered by several factors. First, there remains a lack of agreement regarding the rationale and motives for voice provision. Industrial relations commentators, on the
one hand, are primarily interested in issues of industrial citizenship and social democracy. Employee voice is thus viewed as a right in modern democratic societies, in contrast to the more authoritarian and Taylorist workplace regimes, which are believed to undermine the idea of liberal capitalist democracy. On the other hand, commentators writing from an HRM perspective tend to emphasise how giving employees a voice can make good business sense and hence improve organisational performance. The assumption is that employee voice is a potential means of unlocking and capturing discretionary effort that can benefit organisations. Feeling heard, it is argued, can also improve employee satisfaction and motivation (Burris et al, 2012). Inevitably the two perspectives result in different views regarding the most appropriate and effective means of expressing employee voice. For most IR commentators, the focus on improving working conditions, combined with an imbalance of power between employers and employees, means collective employee representation and joint regulation through trade unions and collective bargaining are the best vehicles for expressing employee voice. From an HRM perspective, where voice is viewed more in terms of potential links to business performance, employers tend to favour more individualistic, direct and task-centred employee involvement initiatives. In turn, the two perspectives result in a lack of agreement regarding the scope of employee voice and the range of issues that should be on—or indeed kept off—the agenda. These tensions are compounded by the fact that the same terminology is often applied to a diverse range of organisational voice practices, meaning that the names of the voice practices used reveal very little about their purpose, operation or motives. Yet while a steady stream of research has examined the various motives, processes and outcomes of employee voice, less attention has been paid to fully exploring the crucial issue of employee demand and utilisation of ‘voice opportunities’ (Avery and Quinones, 2002). The
pattern of silence among employees results in a climate of organisational silence, which can seriously impede organisational decision-making and performance (Morrison and Milliken, 2000). There is also a need to consider how silence relates to employee voice. However, it remains unclear whether silence should be viewed as the opposite of voice, or whether it is best understood as a distinctive construct (Ashford et al, 2009). On the one hand, it is possible that employees make a simple choice between expressing their views (voice) or keeping quiet (silence). Silence can thus be viewed as the antithesis of voice (Donaghey et al, 2011). On the other hand, while voice can be viewed as a deliberate choice, silence might be not be a conscious decision, but the result of more general feelings of disengagement, psychological withdrawal or simply having nothing to say. The absence of intentional silence, defined as the deliberate withholding of information, does not mean the presence of voice behaviour (Brinsfield, 2012). Silence and voice can thus both be thought of as complex and multi-dimensional constructs (Van Dyne et al, 2003), and understanding the different motives for silence is therefore crucial. In this respect, Pinder and Harlos (2001) make a useful distinction between acquiescent silence (where employees passively withhold ideas) and quiescent silence (where employees actively withhold ideas for a particular reason). This concept is developed further by Van Dyne et al (2003) who suggest that silence and voice can both have acquiescent, defensive and prosocial forms. Where employees deliberately refrain from speaking up, there is a whole range of possible reasons. While much of the extant research has focused upon silence as a ‘risk avoidance’ strategy, recent studies suggest a wider range of explanations for silence, including deviant behaviour, to avoid damaging a relationship, fear of speaking up, lack of confidence, perceived ineffectiveness, and general disengagement (Brinsfield, 2012).
The relationship between voice and silence is further complicated by the possibility that employees might decide to voice concerns about certain issues while remaining silent about some others, depending on both the nature of the issues or the particular period of time. For example, Ryan and Oestreich (1998) suggest that concerns about issues such as pay inequity, managerial incompetence and decision-making procedures are often considered to be difficult to raise. The situation is further complicated, depending on whether or not the voice is challenging or supporting the status quo. The former is most likely to be met by resistance from managers and potentially generate conflict (Burris et al, 2012). Patterns of employee voice and silence are therefore neither fixed nor absolute, reflecting the discretionary nature of employee voice behaviour (Morrison, 2011). Given that variations in patterns of employee voice and silence are dynamic, both within and between organisations, several studies have attempted to explain employee inclinations towards both voice and silence, the factors that shape these choices and the types of issues more likely to be associated with silence (Milliken and Morrison, 2003). Several organisational and individual factors have been identified as potentially influencing the propensity for voice or silence, respectively. In understanding variations between, and dominant patterns within, organisations, one can consider how ‘favourable’ the organisational context is for promoting voice, and the nature of organisational norms (Argyris, 1977). Relevant factors that might influence the contextual ‘favourability’ include formal organisational structure, levels of hierarchy and status differences, the behaviour of managers and supervisors, as well as the general organisational culture and climate (Morrison, 2011; Wang and Hsieh, 2012). These factors can, in turn, influence the perceived consequences of voice. Where the consequences are perceived to be negative, this
contextual environment in which employees find themselves. The fact that voice and silence are conceptualised in terms of external and environmental factors is not a bad approach. Voice and silence are thus (v) strongly sociological concepts. But they are also psychological constructs characterised by a large degree of introspection. As such, the decision to speak up or to remain silent has arguably as much to do with internal personality structure as it does with external organisational structure. In short, there is a need for a much more in-depth treatment of the internal and social psychological dynamics surrounging attitudes towards workplace democracy. More specifically, there is a clear need to explore why some employees might choose to remain silent even when voice is offered, especially in light of the fact that voice is widely regarded as a good thing. We are not arguing that voice and silence have never been examined from the point of view of personality structure. Several extent studies have incorporated psychological variables. For example, LePine and Van Dyne (2001) examined voice and silence as a product of individual personality characteristics. Similarly, Premeaux and Bedeian (2003) looked at voice in relation to self-monitoring personality structures, and Harlos (2012) has examined the relationship between person-centred characteristics such as gender and work self-esteem, and the use of formal voice mechanisms. Although Van Dyne et al (2003) do not explicitly include personality structure into their model of employee silence, they acknowledge that personality is a moderating relationship that should ‘be added to the model’ (1383). The present study thus adds to these contributions by focusing specifically on one particular form of personality structure that has heretofore never been explored in the context of the employee voice and silence literatures: the authoritarian personality. THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY THEORY
The authoritarian personality theory can be situated in the broader context of the Frankfurt School (Jay, 1996; Bottomore, 2002; Tarr, 2011), the key members of which include: founder Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, and later Jurgen Habermas, among others. Though it would be inadvisable to paint the Frankfurt scholars with the same brush—they are not, after all, simply a homogenous group of ‘Jewish Marxists’ who always agreed with one another (Hohendahl, 1985)—there are nevertheless some underlying commonalities that appear to coalesce into an identifiable school of thought. The Frankfurt scholars, both pre-WWII and post-WWII, were influenced strongly by Marx, but Hegel, Weber, Kant, Lukács, and particularly Freud were also formative voices in the development of what is known today as critical theory (Held, 1991). The origins of the Frankfurt School can be traced back to various historico-cultural contexts, including: ‘the defeat of left- wing working-class movements in Western Europe after the first world war, the collapse of left- wing parties in Germany […] the degeneration of the Russian revolution into Stalinism and the rise of fascism and Nazism’ (ibid: 208). It was the ascendency of the Third Reich that planted the seeds that would later grow into a major production of the Frankfurt School: The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al, 1950). In the study’s forward, Horkheimer and Flowerman (1950: v) pose a question: ‘How could [men] explain the willingness of great masses of people to tolerate the mass extermination of their fellow citizens?’. The authors sought to understand not so much the nature of fascism as an ideology, but rather the inexplicably warm reception it received in the broader society. In order to explain the acceptance of the rise of the likes of Hitler and Mussolini, Adorno and his colleagues posited the existence of an authoritarian personality type, or syndrome, marked by anti-democratic tendencies and extreme obsequiousness to authority.
the nine dimensions suffer from an anti-democratic personality structure. The items that make up the F-scale (ibid: 226-227) attempt to measure fascism indirectly. As Benzer (2011: 65) points out, ‘[a]lthough these “items” contained no explicitly fascist or anti-Semitic ideas, the respondents’ evaluations were supposed to disclose attitudinal patterns’. The objective of the instrument was to tap respondents’ ‘secret’ thoughts (Adorno et al, 1950: 4) and consequently relay a quantitative score that is indicative of one’s general disposition toward fascism. According to Adorno and his colleagues, the fascist individual shares several traits in common, including: an obsession with conventional, middle class values; total submission to the authority of the country’s leaders; aggression toward anyone critical of leaders and conventional, middle class values; opposition to subjectivity, imagination, and tender-mindedness; a belief in the supernatural and a tendency to stereotype; disdain for weakness and a preoccupation with strength; a cynical hostility toward human beings; belief that the world is dangerous and out of control; and an obsession with sex and sexuality. As Benzer (2011: 65) notes, The Authoritarian Personality has ‘attracted severe methodological criticism’, including Hyman and Sheatsley (1954), Ray (1984), and Samuelson (1992). These critiques mainly centre around the poverty of the psychometric methods that were used to design and validate the F-scale. Martin (2001: 1) even goes so far as to argue that The Authoritarian Personality is ‘probably the most deeply flawed work of prominence in political psychology’. His critique focuses on what he perceived to be deep-seated methodological bias in the study. Other researchers argue that authoritarianism is more of an attitude than a personality structure (Roiser and Willig, 2002). Still others (Lasch, 1991; Zizek, 2006) slammed Adorno et al (1950) for suggesting that left-wing ideology implies mental sanity whilst right-wing politics imply a psychiatric illness.
Whilst it is important to recognise such criticisms, it is equally important to recognise the study’s strengths. Brewster Smith (1997: 159), for example, notes that, ‘[i]n spite of warranted criticisms of the F-Scale, the major substantive findings of TAP [ The Authoritarian Personality ] have held up well’. Similarly, Meloen (1993) presents meta-analytic evidence over decades that supports the validity of the F-Scale and its predictive ability. The major strengths of Adorno et al. (1950) are at least three. First, the items in the F-Scale were developed not in isolation, but rather on the basis of many in-depth qualitative interviews that provided conceptual direction. Second, the F-Scale is the end result of a long process that went through multiple iterations and modifications before it was finalised. Third, the scale has been validated time and again among political and social psychologists. These three strengths justify why the authoritarian personality theory was used in this paper. A POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF WORKPLACE DEMOCRACY The authoritarian personality theory was always meant to be a macro-level conceptual framework aimed at linking personality to the broader societal structure. It was never meant to be a micro-level framework with applications to organisations and workplaces. So to the extent that it can be transposed at the level of the workplace, one can expect some teething problems. But there have already been several examples of the integration of fundamentally social theory in the micro-context of the workplace (Thompson, 1989; Alvesson and Willmott, 1992; Korczynski et al, 2006). So it would seem that nothing precludes the application of the authoritarian personality theory to the micro-political context of workplace democracy. Having said that, Adorno et al (1950) made no reference whatsoever to the concept of employee voice, so one can only extrapolate how their framework might be integrated into a political psychology of employee participation. In short, it can be argued that employees
default, choosing to go against the interests of the employer or organisation, as if one party wins at the expense of the other. Whilst there may be some element of win-lose dynamics in the employment relationship (Kelly, 1998), there is also plenty of evidence to suggest that employee voice delivers mutual gains for employers and employees (Lewin, 2011). But in spite of this limitation, the authoritarian personality theory can be used to explain not only why an employee would choose (or not) to join a union, but also why he or she would want (or not) to have a voice in the workplace. In short, it is expected that those who score highly on the F-scale, thus exhibiting strong authoritarian tendencies, will reject employee involvement in decision-making on principle, preferring instead to defer to managerial authority. Conversely, low scoring respondents will likely seek a pro-active voice in the workplace, evincing a healthy dose of skepticism towards the notion that managements always know best. Whether or not these assumptions are true is ultimately an empirical question. The mechanism underlying them is an important theoretical question that can serve as a starting-point for an empirical investigation. Although it would be an interesting academic exercise to ask whether or not fear of castration or sexual repression are somehow linked to whether or not an employee wants to have a voice in the workplace, this would hardly be a practical question to ask. Setting aside the academic question of repressed sexuality and some metaphoric fear of castration, Adorno et al’s (1950) framework can still be used to ask, practically speaking, what type of personality structures are likely to embrace and/or reject workplace democracy. Furthermore, this question is easily testable, empirically speaking. It would not make much sense to attempt to correlate individual items in the F-scale with support for the concept of workplace democracy. After all, as Sanford et al (1950: 242) point out, ‘no item taken by itself could be regarded as diagnostic of
potential fascism’. But having said that, seven of the nine latent variables articulated in Table 1 could reasonably be expected to correlate with the extent to which an employee might want to participate in decision-making. For example, conventionalism could be expected to correlate negatively with support for employee voice. The conventionalistic individual prefers normative workplace power structures and ‘could in good conscience follow the dictates of the external agency wherever they might lead him’ (ibid: 230). Authoritarian submission and authoritarian aggression, two hallmarks of the fascistic individual, are expected to relate negatively to support for workplace democracy. The propensity to submit to authority, the emotional need for a strong leader, and the condemning of anyone who challenges the powers-that-be are potential indicators of resistance to worker empowerment. Anti-intraception, defined as opposition to subjectivity and imagination, could be associated with negative attitudes toward employee voice inasmuch as voice, by definition, is subjective. What Sanford et al. (1950: 237-238) refer to as power and ‘toughness’ might reasonably correlate negatively with support for employee voice. Subjects scoring highly on this latent variable are obsessed with power figures and the dynamics of dominance-submission, strength-weakness, and leadership-followership. They admire ‘power in others and [are] inclined to submit to it’ (ibid: 237). Destructiveness and cynicism, characterised by an intense hostility toward that which is human, clearly lends itself to an opposition to employee voice. If human beings are perceived generally as worthless, they are unlikely to have any opinions that matter in the workplace. Finally, projectivity, or the belief that the world is a wild and dangerous place, might be associated negatively with support for workplace democracy. If indeed the world is wild and dangerous, then it might follow logically that strong, decisive leaders are the only means of salvation to ensure the future of the organisation.
in the employment relationship such that employers can choose to silence workers simply by not providing the mechanisms for voice (Willman et al, 2006). But precisely why some employees choose silence over and above voice even when the mechanisms for participation are in place is not fully understood. This paper has provided a tentative explanation to this conundrum. Resistance to employee voice and workplace democracy, it is argued, is rooted in one’s personality structure. In particular, the paper argues that some employees derive pleasure in obedience and subservience to the will of the employer. Such employees are said to suffer from an authoritarian personality syndrome, ‘a more or less enduring structure in the person that renders him receptive to antidemocratic propaganda’ (Sanford et al, 1950: 228). They prefer total and absolute submission to revered leaders and take offense to the idea that employees should participate in decision-making. This contempt for democracy in the workplace stands firm even in the face of evidence linking employee voice to any number of clear benefits for the employee. The paper obviously invites further inquiry and empirical analysis, and hopes to serve as a theoretical foundation for such investigations. The next step, clearly, is to conduct an empirical analysis, most likely some sort of latent variable model, to test the integrity of the theory articulated in this paper. Such a study should throw some light on the scope of the authoritarian personality and its effects. Simultaneously, some qualitative research is in order to discover not just whether or not some employees prefer silence over voice, but why this might be the case. Another avenue, in light of the criticism surrounding Adorno et al (1950), might be to employ a set of alternative measures of the authoritarian personality. For example, Altemeyer (1981) is widely recognised (for example, see Martin, 2001) as providing a comparatively more robust, or
at least a more contemporaneous, set of quantitative measures of what he has referred to as ‘right-wing authoritarianism’. A further area of future research is to evaluate the impact of the authoritarian personality on calls for a more multi-cultural workplace. Multi-culturalism draws heavily from the literature on workplace discrimination, diversity and inclusion (see Ozbiligin, 2009 for an overview). This framework assumes that all groups of workers should be given an equal voice at work, and that the silencing of certain groups of employees over and above others is oftentimes a consequence of employer discrimination (Bell et al, 2011). The authoritarian personality theory could present a potential challenge to this assumption. Again, this is an empirical question that can only be answered through the collection of quantitative and qualitative data on authoritarianism, multi- culturalism and employee voice. Another idea for future research surrounds the potential for authoritarian personalities to thrive within the union movement, not just the workplace. There are links here to longstanding questions surrounding the nature of union democracy, and in particular Michels (1962) ‘iron law of oligarchy’ thesis, which suggests that even organisations committed to the principles of democracy, such as unions, will eventually—and inevitably—become dominated by a small elite. For some, union democracy is possible given the presence of specific contextual factors (Lipset et al, 1956), but is likely to be very much the exception that proves the rule. Again, this would be an interesting area for empirical enquiry and theories of authoritarianism could provide a useful theoretical framework. One last area that lends itself to further research is that, whilst the present study has focused upon authoritarianism and the motivation to make voice heard, authoritarianism could also be examined by considering the potential to silence the voice of others. Processes such as
