Silence phenomenon in organizational life: Qualitative research on silence within the formal groups in academic organizations

This study aims to reveal the antecedents and meanings of silence behavior within the formal groups in academic organizations. To this end, a deep and comprehensive investigation was performed on 36 academic staff (professor, associate professor and assistant professor), who had experienced silence in the mentioned context, by using the phenomenological approach as a qualitative method. At this point, semi-structured in-depth interview technique was used as a tool to generate the basic data. Furthermore, other data collection tools such as observations, pre-interviews and document analysis were also used to triangulate and enrich the data. The findings revealed that silence within the formal groups in academic organizations was caused due to psychological factors (risk perception, belief of futility and intention to disguise oneself), socio-cultural factors (social learning and national culture), individual factors (tactical execution tendency, organizational position and experience level), situational factors (atmosphere and agenda of the meeting), managerial factors (management style, imposition of decisions, mentality of setting up one's own cadre in management and expectation of unanimity), factors attributed to the organizational context (interpersonal relations, group and power dynamics), and the system (system of higher education). On the other hand, inductive assessments were made by digging the grounded meanings of the research data, and it was concluded that silence reflects a form of political behavior within the formal groups in academic organizations. Within this framework, this study puts forth original definitions and different understandings related to the silence phenomenon in organizational life with its notable findings specific to the context. In this sense, it gives important clues to guide further research and sheds light upon some new research questions that need to be studied in this field. Keywords: Silence, political behavior, qualitative method, phenomenological research, academic organizations, formal groups, Turkey.