Original title: Perceived organizational silence climate and turnover intention: indirect associations through learned helplessness, psychological withdrawal, and job burnout
The study looks at employees in South Korean digital platform service firms. It asks whether thinking that speaking up is pointless or risky is linked to wanting to leave. Employees who perceived more of this silence climate also reported more helplessness, withdrawal, and burnout; each was linked to stronger turnover intentionA person’s stated intention to leave their job.. The links through all three were statistically significant, but the study cannot show that one thing caused another.
Imagine a team cooking dinner together. People stop suggesting changes when they think nobody will listen or that speaking up will get them blamed. That silence can go along with feeling powerless, checking out, or getting worn down, and those feelings can go along with wanting to leave the team. In this paper, the kitchen team’s belief about whether it is safe and useful to speak stands for employees’ perceived silence climate, and wanting to leave stands for turnover intention.
For managers at digital platform service firms, the study points to a workplace risk beyond whether employees actually speak up: whether they believe speaking up is useful or safe. That perception was linked to several experiences associated with wanting to leave, so checking it may help organizations understand turnover intention.
The data came from a cross-sectional, single-source survey of employees at digital platform service firms in South Korea. The results describe associations, not causal effects. The indirect associations need confirmation in longitudinal or multiwave studies.
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Perceived organizational silence climate and turnover intention: indirect associations through learned helplessness, psychological withdrawal, and job burnout — Wooik Shin, Boyoung Kim — Frontiers in Psychology — doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1962689
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.