• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.31-62
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• 2017

It found that employee silence negatively impacts both organizations and their employees as shown in findings from many studies and recently there has been a growing interest in it. Silence is described as intentionally withholding job-related ideas, information, concerns, and opinions. Employee silence may decrease organizational change and innovation and reduce employee learning motivation and knowledge sharing engagement as well. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationships among silence motivations, perceived silence climate, and employee silence; the relationships among employee silence, learning inertia and knowledge sharing disengagement; the mediating role of employee silence between antecedents of employee silence and consequences additionally. The results that analyzed using data from 225 employees in 42 organizations are as follows. First, the impact of silence motivation and perceived silence climate on employee silence are positively significant. Second, the influence of defensive silence motivation on the acquiescent and relational silence motivation is positively significant. Third, the influence of employee silence on learning inertia and knowledge sharing disengagement is positively significant. Forth, employee silence mediates the relationship between silence motivation and perceived silence climate and learning inertia and knowledge sharing disengagement. These results suggest that employee silence is another strong expression and message for organizations to try to establish a learning organization from the perspective of knowledge management.

• 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.

• Korean Journal of Culture and Social Issue
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.1-17
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• 2013

The present study aimed to investigate the discrimination between employee voice and silence behavior in measurement: it is silence behavior the absence of voice or not? It was examined using confirmatory factor analysis. Five measurement models based on the suggestion of Pinder & Harlos(2001) and Van Dyne, Ang, & Botero(2003) were compared. Additionally, the hierarchical multiple regression analysis was conducted for examining the incremental validity of silence behaviors over voice. A total of 204 employees who worked with their own supervisor were surveyed. Results indicated that silence behavior could be a separate construct from voice. Findings also showed that silence behaviors could be distinguished by the level of concreteness in definition, difference in content of motivation and have the incremental validity over voice in only acquiescent Silence. From these results, the theoretical implications of findings, limitations, suggestions for future research were discussed in discussion.