Organizational silence in civil aviation: A study on the reasons not to self-report of aircraft maintenance personnel

New generation safety management approaches are based on the principal of continuous improvement of safety. Ensuring the continuous improvement of safety is only possible by using Safety Management System (SMS) which is the basic tool in new generation safety management approach and showing a proactive and predictive approach. To carry out SMS successfully, there is a need for qualified and rich data set. An essential resource of safety related data and information is voluntary reports of personnel. Nevertheless, it is thought that the personnel do not report unsafe conditions, events and their reasons and risk reducing precautions adequately and voluntarily which is very valuable to ensure safety. Organizational silence, the biggest obstacle of organizational success, is stated as avoiding of personnel to express feelings, opinions and ideas about the organizational issues, correspond to avoiding from voluntary reporting in aviation organizations. In this context, this study aims to exhibit the dimensions of reasons not to report the unsafe events/conditions or to avoid to articulate safety increasing suggestions. In this content this study is carried out with the personnel of aircraft maintenance organizations who play the key role in ensuring the safety performance. To achieve this goal, we developed a data gathering tool. We first made reliability and validity analysis to the data collected from 483 personnel. Then we tested the structure of reasons not to voluntary report in aviation organizations with explanatory and confirmatory factor analysis. As a consequence, we ascertained that personnel in aircraft maintenance organizations do not report voluntarily for four reasons. These four factors are prosocial and relational silence, disengaged silence, acquiescent silence and defensive silence.