26.282 - Silence Is Not Agreement
“This feeling of ‘why bother?’ has been found to be a strong inhibitor to speaking up.”
Elizabeth Wolfe Morrison, 2014, interview excerpt reproduced by NYU Stern
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Receptivity
Elizabeth Wolfe Morrison is an organizational scholar at New York University's Stern School of Business.
Her research examines how employees take initiative, contribute ideas, and decide whether to raise concerns. She has studied both the willingness to speak and the information people withhold, asking how relationships and working conditions shape those choices. Her teaching includes leadership and negotiation, fields in which what reaches the conversation can matter as much as what happens within it.
Morrison's work offers a useful starting point for examining our own influence. When we ask for feedback, we hear the answers that arrive. We have much less access to the thoughts that never become answers. That difference invites curiosity about the invitation itself: its timing, its setting, and what the other person can reasonably expect afterward. Her research gives us a reason to slow down before turning an unanswered question into a conclusion about what everyone believes.
The Pause After the Question
Imagine a manager finishing a discussion of a new handover procedure. Requests have sometimes been lost between shifts, and the team needs a clearer way to pass work along. The proposed system is straightforward. Each person will record what has been completed before leaving, allowing the next person to pick up without retracing the whole day. The manager reaches the end of the explanation, looks around, and asks, “Any objections?” Nobody answers. A few minutes later, while writing the recap, the manager types: “Everyone agreed to the new procedure.”
The sentence sounds ordinary. It is also more definite than the meeting was. No objection was voiced; agreement was not established. Someone may have welcomed the change. Someone else may have needed to see the form in use. Another person may have been weighing a question that was not yet clear enough to ask. We have no way to choose among those possibilities from the pause alone. Yet the recap has already settled the matter, turning an absence of replies into a statement on behalf of the group.
That leap deserves attention because the recap may become what people rely on later. If difficulties emerge, “everyone agreed” can make a fresh concern look like a reversal. A colleague who was still thinking may now have to correct both the plan and the record of their support for it. The manager did not intend to create that extra task. A convenient sentence nevertheless assigned a position that some people never expressed. Before changing the whole process, the manager can make one useful correction: describe what actually happened.
You may recognize a smaller version of this moment. You propose a plan in a group message, receive two enthusiastic replies, and begin to think of it as the group's preference. Or you ask whether anyone minds taking on an extra responsibility and hear nothing from the person whose answer matters most. There can be perfectly ordinary reasons for a delayed reply. The useful discipline is to keep the unanswered part visible. “I haven't heard back” leaves room for another person's experience; “they're fine with it” completes that experience for them.
None of this requires treating every quiet room as a warning sign. Agreement is among the possible explanations, and people need not speak simply to reassure an organizer that they are participating. The manager can also retain responsibility for making a decision. What changes is the claim being made: “I am proceeding with this plan” owns a judgment, while “everyone supports it” describes other people's positions. Separating those statements allows action to continue without asking silence to supply an endorsement it cannot reliably give.
An Invitation Has a History
Think about the last time you offered a suggestion and then heard nothing more about it. You might have assumed the person was busy, decided the idea was impractical, or wondered whether it had been considered at all. Now imagine receiving a different response: an explanation of the constraint, a smaller change that could be made, and a message when that change happened. Even if your preferred solution was declined, you would have something concrete to go on the next time you considered contributing. A new invitation arrives alongside the experience of earlier answers.
In the handover meeting, that history also sits within a relationship. The manager may assign work, assess performance, and decide which problems receive attention. Those responsibilities remain present even when the invitation is warm. A colleague weighing a concern may be considering how it will sound, how much explanation it will require, or whether anything remains open to change. Morrison and her colleagues found that feeling less powerful was linked to withholding input, with that relationship weaker when the recipient was perceived as open to it. Their work directs attention toward the experience of approaching the person who can act on a concern (Morrison et al., 2015).
This gives the feeling in Morrison's opening quotation a more generous interpretation. “Why bother?” can coexist with caring about the work. Someone may have already spent time describing a difficulty and have little reason to expect a different response. A warmer invitation may be welcome, but it leaves the practical question of what will happen next unresolved. The manager can begin to answer that question by identifying what is still open, allowing time to examine it, and explaining how a contribution will receive consideration.
There is something for the person asking to notice, too. A workable proposal has taken effort, the day is crowded, and agreement would make the next step easier. The pause can feel like relief. If I want a quick resolution, I have a particular reason to examine the interpretation that gives me one. I can appreciate the work I have done while acknowledging what I still do not know. That small separation between hope and evidence is a practical form of self-knowledge, especially when other people may have to live with the decision I am about to make.
The recap gives that interpretation a longer life. Someone who missed the meeting may read it as an account of the team's considered view. Someone who attended may wonder whether they were the only person with a reservation. The person writing the summary has influence over how the exchange will be remembered. Recording uncertainty accurately leaves a place for further thought; declaring agreement can make that same thought look late or inconvenient. This is one reason careful wording matters even when the decision itself remains the manager's to make.
A lively discussion does not resolve the uncertainty either. Research distinguishes speaking up and withholding across issues and occasions: someone can contribute on one matter while keeping another concern to themselves. The amount of conversation therefore cannot establish that all relevant information has reached the table (Sherf et al., 2021).
For the manager, a useful next question is: “Where could this procedure make your work harder or leave something out?” That invites people to examine whether the proposal works, including difficulties its author has missed. It gives a colleague room to disagree as well as ask for clarification. Someone may need to look at an actual handover before answering; someone else may have nothing to add. The invitation becomes more credible when there is enough time to consider it and a clear account of what a response could still influence.
You can apply the same care wherever you have informal influence. If you have organized a volunteer activity for years, explain which parts of the plan are settled and which would benefit from another person's experience. When you send the follow-up message, distinguish what was decided from what people explicitly supported. These are manageable acts of consideration. They allow you to keep the work moving while giving others a fair account of where their contribution can fit.
Let the Response Make the Invitation Credible
Return to the manager's unsent recap. “Everyone agreed” becomes: “We discussed the proposed handover procedure. No objections were raised during the meeting. Please review the form and send any concerns before the trial begins.” The manager supplies a deadline that leaves time to consider the replies. This version accurately describes the exchange and makes the next opportunity understandable. A colleague can now raise a question within the process as described, without first disputing a claim that they had already endorsed the plan.
That is a small but meaningful use of authority. The manager has removed an unnecessary obstacle created by the manager's own account. There is less for a contributor to untangle before the substance can receive attention. We can look for similar opportunities in our own messages: a sentence that treats a tentative response as a commitment, or a summary that makes an unresolved point sound settled. Correcting such wording gives the other person room to speak from their actual position. It also gives us a more dependable basis for the next decision.
The invitation can offer an alternative to speaking in the group. Someone may prefer a written note or a separate conversation, especially if they need to assemble an example. The manager should explain who will see the message and what may need to be shared to address it. Calling an exchange private does not make it anonymous, and removing a name may still leave the contributor recognizable. A credible invitation promises only what the person receiving the information can provide; the choice of route should reflect the real circumstances of the team.
Suppose a colleague writes back: the form records completed work, but there is no place for a request still waiting for an answer. The manager asks the colleague to walk through one such request. Together they discover that the next shift needs both the unfinished task and a clear indication of who will take the next action. The colleague brings experience of the handover, and the manager brings responsibility for making the arrangement workable. The revised recap left room for this exchange without first requiring the colleague to reopen a supposedly settled question.
The manager may feel an impulse to say, “I wish you knew you could always come to me.” That feeling is understandable, but the colleague should not have to provide reassurance about the manager's openness before the practical issue is addressed. Staying with the request allows receptivity to take a visible form. Ask, check, consider, answer. The colleague can judge that experience for themselves, without being asked to declare trust or explain why the concern was not raised sooner.
A considered answer can include a revision, a constraint, or a reason to retain the existing approach. Perhaps an additional field will solve the problem. Perhaps the information already exists elsewhere and a clearer instruction would avoid duplicating it. The colleague does not have to redesign the entire procedure before the concern counts, and the manager remains responsible for weighing the options. What matters for the subsequent account is accuracy: describe the difficulty considered and the decision taken. Acknowledging input is entirely compatible with making a judgment that its contributor would not have chosen.
The next message can make that work visible to the people who depend on the handover. It can explain what changed, what remains undecided, and when an unresolved question will receive another look. There is no need to turn one contribution into evidence of universal support. Nor should a contributor be identified without permission. An honest update gives the group useful information while allowing each person to retain their own view. Over time, those responses provide something more substantial to assess than repeated assurances that the door is always open.
Patience belongs in this process. A person who has encountered dismissive responses may continue to be reserved, and one thoughtful exchange cannot tell us what they now believe. We can still assess the commitments within our control: whether we described the decision honestly, made the available choices clear, considered the concern, and followed through. Those actions have value without requiring another person to reward them with immediate confidence. They make our participation more responsible and give future conversations a better history to draw upon.
The opportunity for growth is also personal. We can take pride in a sound proposal while allowing another person's knowledge to improve it. Our competence can include the ability to receive information that was missing from our first account. In this team, that expanded understanding has ordinary, shared consequences: the next shift knows what remains to be done, a colleague's experience contributes to the method, and a person waiting for an answer is less likely to be overlooked. The improvement belongs to the work and to the people it serves.
The manager's final update can now be brief: “The revised form records unfinished requests, their next action, and an owner. We'll try it for one week and review what still needs work.” It offers a clear account of what will happen next, with room to learn from the trial. The first recap would have closed the conversation with an agreement nobody had established. This one leaves the team with something they can use: a concern considered, a responsibility clarified, and a shared task made more workable through another person's contribution.
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Practice: Give a Concern a Way Through
Estimated time: 12 minutes
Choose one real or imagined situation in which you invite other people to comment on a decision or shared plan. Notice what you actually know about their responses and what you may have inferred from a lack of reply. Consider your own influence, one possible difficulty in responding, and an appropriate way for a concern to reach someone who can consider it.
The worksheet helps you prepare a clear invitation and a realistic commitment to respond. Your outcome is one exchange you can make more thoughtful, including how you will communicate what happened to the input. You can complete the reflection privately; if you do not control the process, work with a hypothetical example or an optional suggestion within your influence. You do not need to confront anyone or disclose sensitive information.
Scientific Summary
Two questions offer a useful way into the research behind this scene: Could saying this make a difference? and What might happen to me if I say it? Picture two colleagues considering the same concern. One expects a civil reply but remembers earlier suggestions that went nowhere. The other thinks the concern could change the plan but worries about embarrassing the manager in front of the group. Their quiet might look identical from the other end of the table. Our imagined examples give us different questions to explore before deciding what that quiet means.
Researchers describe the expectation of making a difference as perceived impact. Psychological safety concerns whether people expect to be able to contribute without being ridiculed or punished. Neither concept means getting one's preferred decision. There is another distinction underneath them: employee silence refers to withholding relevant ideas or information. Having something to say and holding it back differs from having nothing to add. An unanswered question alone does not tell us which has occurred (Morrison, 2023).
These distinctions help explain why encouraging speech and understanding withholding require attention to different things. In Sherf and colleagues' meta-analysis, perceived impact was more strongly associated with speaking up than with withholding. Greater psychological safety was associated with less withholding, and that relationship was stronger than its association with speaking up. Some comparisons were weaker in the monthly analyses of their follow-up study. The pattern helps us ask about both the expected usefulness of contributing and the anticipated consequences (Sherf et al., 2021).
Now consider the person receiving the concern. Morrison, See, and Pan found that the relationship between feeling less powerful and withholding input was weaker when the recipient was perceived as open to it. This adds another reason to look beyond the words of an invitation. In our handover example, explaining what can still change and returning with a considered answer gives a colleague something concrete to judge. These are applications we can examine in context; the study did not test this particular invitation or worksheet (Morrison et al., 2015).
The evidence comes from several approaches. Morrison, See, and Pan used a laboratory experiment and two workplace surveys. Sherf and colleagues combined findings across studies and followed employees over six months. Much of Sherf's evidence was correlational, and the six-month follow-up relied on self-reports, limiting causal conclusions. The workplace settings also matter when we apply the ideas to volunteer groups or other relationships. The two questions are prompts for thoughtful inquiry, not a way to diagnose someone's motives or certify that an invitation is safe (Morrison et al., 2015; Sherf et al., 2021).
For the reader, the useful connection is between how we invite a contribution and what we make of the response. We can leave uncertainty visible, consider the practical stakes of replying, and explain what happened to the input we received. Those choices give another person's experience a fairer opportunity to inform the work. They also keep us from mistaking our own interpretation for an answer that someone else has yet to give.
References
Morrison, E. W. (2023). Employee voice and silence: Taking stock a decade later. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 79–107. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-120920-054654
Morrison, E. W., See, K. E., & Pan, C. (2015). An approach-inhibition model of employee silence: The joint effects of personal sense of power and target openness. Personnel Psychology, 68(3), 547–580. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12087
NYU Stern. (2014, September 8). Profs Elizabeth Morrison and Kelly See's research on employee silence in the workplace is featured. https://www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/faculty-research/profs-elizabeth-morrison-and-kelly-see-s-research-employee-silence-workplace
NYU Stern Executive Education. (n.d.). Elizabeth Wolfe Morrison. https://execed.stern.nyu.edu/pages/elizabeth-morrison-1
Sherf, E. N., Parke, M. R., & Isaakyan, S. (2021). Distinguishing voice and silence at work: Unique relationships with perceived impact, psychological safety, and burnout. Academy of Management Journal, 64(1), 114–148. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2018.1428
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