Classification of white collar employees according to the organizational silence attitudes and the effect of organizational silence over the organizational cynicism

The concept of organizational silence known as the failure of employees to speak their own opinions by remaining silent for various reasons in businesses and the negative attitudes of employees towards the organizations which they work for which is known as the organizational cynicism are one of the most important topics in management literature. When the literature on the subject is examined, it is observed that there is not a lot of researchs on the relationship between these two concepts. The aim of this thesis is to classify white collar employees in terms of the levels of organizational silence in Turkey, to demonstrate the effect of organizational silence over organizational cynicism, to determine whether employees differ significantly in terms of organizational cynicism attitudes according to different levels of organizational silence and to examine whether there are significant differences in attitudes upon organizational silence and organizational cynicism according to the demographics of white collar employees. For this purpose, by applying the organizational silence scale that developed by Knoll and Dick (2012) and the organizational cynicism scale which developed by Brandes, Dharwadkar and Dean (1999) the data was collected from 440 white-collar employees. The results of the analysis displayed that there is a significant and positive relationship between organizational silence and organizational cynicism, moreover organizational silence has a positive and meaningful effect on all dimensions of organizational cynicism. By clustering analysis, white collar employees were classified into two groups in terms of organizational silence levels as "the silents" and "those who speak their own thoughts and ideas" and it was determined that in terms of perceptions of organizational cynicism there was significant difference between the employees in these two groups. The study also found that perceptions of organizational silence and organizational cynicism differ significantly in terms of demographic (gender, age, marital status, education, experience, position, sector) and characteristic indicators of white collar employees.