Iranian Journal of Ergonomics

Nowadays, organizations expect their employees to be more responsible and innovative than ever before and to talk about organizational issues and problems [1]. Pinder and Harlos consider the silence of employees in an organization as "the refusal of employees to convey their sincere and true statements about the situation and organizational events to those who are in a position that can influence these situations" [2]. In another definition, Henrikson and Dayton define organizational silence as a collective phenomenon in which individuals have very little involvement in responding to the issues and problems that the organization faces [3].
When a system of silence is reinforced in a system, the diverse views, opinions, preferences, and goals that exist in the organization are unlikely to be an incentive to comment; hence, such a system enters a process that cannot achieve its goals properly and does not seek to learn from experience. In fact, such a system is caught in a way that will reinforce the negative effects of silence on organizational decision-making and change processes [6]. For this reason, management must feel its great managerial risk; because organizational silence has irreparable consequences for the organization.
One of the factors affecting organizational silence is perceived organizational support, which means that the organization values ​​the cooperation, assistance and support of its members and is concerned about their happiness and future [7]. Meanwhile, emotional commitment also affects organizational silence. Allen and Meyer have defined emotional commitment as "emotional attachment to, organization, and active participation" [9]. Mayer et al. believe that emotional commitment can develop positive experiences and interactions within the organization. Moller believes that emotional commitment is related to employees' sense of belonging, attachment and loyalty to the organization [11].
Various researches have been done on the subject of the present research. A review of the background of the conducted researches shows that so far no research has examined the effect of the variable of organizational support perceived by employees in breaking the silence with the mediating role of emotional commitment and this issue shows the innovative aspect of the present study.
According to the purpose of this study, which is to investigate the effect of the variable of organizational support perceived by employees in breaking the silence with the mediating role of emotional commitment, the research hypotheses are as follows:
1. Perceived organizational support has a significant effect on breaking organizational silence.
2. Perceived organizational support has a significant effect on employees' emotional commitment.
3. Perceived organizational support through emotional commitment has a significant effect on breaking organizational silence.

 

The statistical population of the present study was 900 employees of the public administration of Qom city in 2019. Using Cochran's formula, 273 people were selected by random sampling. The present study has been done by survey method. The data collection tool was a questionnaire. The questionnaire items are standard and have been extracted from valid studies and checked by an expert professor; therefore, its validity has been confirmed. Cronbach's alpha calculation method was also used to evaluate the reliability of the questionnaire. Considering that the coefficient is supposed to be more than 0.7 for the variables and for the whole questionnaire, its reliability was also confirmed. Data analysis was performed after collecting the required data from the participants using SPSS 23 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, Ill., USA) and Smartpls3.

Structural equation modeling (SEM) and partial least squares (PLS) technique were used to investigate the relationships between variables and model fit. Figure 1 shows the significance of the relationships as well as the regression coefficients.
 

Table 1. Symbols used in the model

Figure 1. Significance t for examining the conceptual model (values greater than 1.96 significant at the 0.05 level)





Figure 2. Values of standardized coefficients obtained from structural equation modeling to study the conceptual model
 

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of the variable of organizational support perceived by employees in breaking the silence with the mediating role of emotional commitment. According to the results, perceived organizational support has a 44% effect on breaking organizational silence. The results also showed a direct relationship between perceived organizational support and employees' emotional commitment. The results also showed that emotional commitment mediates the relationship between perceived organizational support and employee silence.

The obtained results showed that all three hypotheses of the researcher have been confirmed; thus, according to the first hypothesis, organizational support causes the failure of organizational silence. In other words, a person's general belief that the organization values ​​his or her efforts and cares about his or her well-being affects the refusal of employees to convey their honest and genuine comments about organizational situations and events. On the other hand, perceived organizational support also improves emotional commitment. That is, if the employees of the organization understand that the person is the target of the organization's human resources programs, his sense of belonging, attachment and loyalty to the organization will increase. Finally, the third hypothesis that organizational support with the mediating variable of emotional commitment affects the failure of organizational silence has been confirmed.
 

The authors are grateful to all those who assisted in the writing of this article.

 

The authors declared no conflict of interest.