What hidden conflicts does employee silence reveal? A comprehensive text mining and topic modeling analysis

Purpose This study aims to investigate the latent themes under employee silence which have barely been explored in the current scenario. The primary goal of the present study is to highlight the hidden factors and issues within the domain of employee silence by using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach on the abstracts of 670 research articles which have been in prominent journals. Design/methodology/approach This paper enumerates the research trends in the domain of employee silence and recommends potential future research opportunities. Abstracts of each collected articles on the subject have been assembled via the SCOPUS directory. The collection of the selected articles (after preprocessing) has been evaluated using Topic Modeling and using LDA algorithm. Findings The major findings after using the LDA algorithm identified the ten major areas that can be explored in the domain of employee silence. In recent years, various research articles have addressed themes as employee silence dynamics, communication in organization and organizational safety voice. In contrast, issues such as job performance, leadership, whistleblower ethical rights and women’s workplace harassment have remained comparatively less explored. This study also examines the relevance of each topic and their potential scope for research. Research limitations/implications The conclusion derived from this research, linked with the analysis of each topic will be extremely beneficial for the editors, researchers and professionals in academia and industry. No other study has used an intelligent algorithm to delineate the research regions associated with employee silence. Originality/value To the greatest extent that the author is aware, this research illustrates the inaugural analysis of employee silence by using the topic modeling technique and unveils the novel themes and figuring out patterns and tendencies in organizational behavior research related to the employee silence.