If Your Employees Aren’t Speaking Up, Blame Company Culture

By Hemant Kakkar, Subra Tangirala
Harvard Business Review | November 2018

DOI

hbr.org/2018/11/if-your-employees-arent-speaking-up-blame-company-culture

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Citation

Kakkar, Hemant., Tangirala, Subra. If Your Employees Aren’t Speaking Up, Blame Company Culture Harvard Business Review hbr.org/2018/11/if-your-employees-arent-speaking-up-blame-company-culture.

Harvard Business Review, 2018

Abstract

Summary. Companies benefit when employees speak up. But employees often remain silent with their opinions, concerns or ideas. There are generally two viewpoints on why: One is the personality perspective, which suggests that these employees lack the disposition to speak out about critical issues, that they might be too introverted or shy to effectively articulate their views to the team. The second is the situational perspective, which argues that these employees fail to speak up because they feel their work environment is not conducive for it. These two perspectives aren’t mutually exclusive, but researchers wanted to test which one matters more. They collected survey data from a manufacturing plant in Malaysia, surveying 291 employees and their supervisors (from 35 teams overall) about their personalities, work environments, and frequency of speaking up. The researchers found that both personality and environment had a significant effect on employee’s tendency to speak up with ideas or concerns — but that strong environmental norms mattered more.

Hemant Kakkar is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Prior to this, he served as an Assistant and Associate (untenured) Professor of Management and Organisations at the Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. He received his doctoral degree in Organisational Behaviour from London Business School.
His research draws on social psychology and evolutionary theories of status and influence to examine judgments and behaviours of individuals and groups within social hierarchies. He also examines individuals' tendencies to engage in both positive and negative deviant behaviours.

He was awarded the 2021 Alvah H. Chapman Jr. Outstanding Dissertation Award, as well as, the Outstanding Dissertation Award 2021 by the International Association of Conflict Management. His research has also won Best Conference Paper awards from the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management (2021) and the International Association of Conflict Management (2021).

His research is published in leading academic journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Applied Psychology, Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. His research has also been featured in several popular media outlets, such as The Washington Post, Forbes, The Atlantic, Scientific American, The Times UK, and the Harvard Business Review.

At ISB, Professor Kakkar teaches the core course in Organisational Behaviour.  He has also taught Foundations of Organisational Behaviour to postgraduate students and graduate-level seminar courses at the Fuqua School of Business. In 2021, he received the Award for Excellence in Teaching for the MMS program. Before joining academia, he worked as a Technical Consultant at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., India.

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