The dynamics of organisational silence: silence creation, transmission, and sustenance in project-based organisations

Despite a growing interest in understanding organisational silence across various professional contexts, extant literature reveals no empirical examination of how organisational silence is transmitted and sustained. Studies have focused on examining antecedents to organisational silence and its relationship with other organisational variables, predominantly in the education, health, and service sectors. This study, however, adopts a holistic approach to studying organisational silence by examining how silence is created, transmitted and sustained in project-based organisations. A qualitative analysis of transcripts was conducted, from 35 professionals working in D1K1 construction firms in Ghana. The study found twelve major themes of contextual factors that created organisational silence, which were broadly categorised into social, cultural, and management factors. Employees’ socioeconomic circumstances, institutional and structural barriers, and cultural factors, both national and organisational culture, sustained organisational silence. The results also showed that silence is a learned behaviour, transmitted to new employees through the process of ‘Assimilation’ or as new employees adapt to organisational systems that constrained their behaviour. Broadly, organisational systems, cultural, and social factors accounted for creating, transmitting, and sustaining organisational silence. These overlapping results imply that contextual factors that create silence may also sustain it. This study provides a holistic investigation of organisational silence, examining how it is created, transmitted and sustained in an underexplored context of project-based organisations. Examining organisational silence in all three aspects is not only novel but can shed a new perspective in understanding the recurring problem of poor knowledge transfer and management in project-based organisations.