• Korean Journal of Culture and Social Issue
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.239-270
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• 2017

This study investigated the nature and dimensionality of the motives why employees showed the silence even though they could speak up their opinions. It aimed to develop the scales measuring employee silence. Thus, three studies were designed and particularly, two studies featured two different studies, totaling five studies. Study 1 conducted open-ended survey asking and 104 workers from a variety of work field answered. With the results of open-ended questions, a were developed, consisting of 60-items to measure employee silence motivation. Study 2 examined the scale developed and 481 workers from diverse work fields participated in. The exploratory factor and 'intra-ESEM' analyses were confirmed the construct of silence motivation, composing 5 factors(acquiescent, defensive, disengaged, opportunistic, relational silence) the 20-items was developed to measure the construct(Study 2-1). Furthermore, 'inter-ESEM' analysis was examined the discriminant validity of scale developed by the current study with general silence behavior and voice behavior. It found that the employee silence was distinguished from general silence behavior and voice behavior(Study 2-2). Study 3 was designed for validation of silence motivation scale which developed from Study 1 and Study 2. Based on these results, the implications and limitations of this study as well as the direction for future study were discussed.