When “Everyone” Knows Something, No One Tells the Boss
Executive Summary
The more widely a given piece of information is shared among employees, the less likely it is that any individual employee will tell a manager about it. This is called the “voice bystander effect.” As a result of the voice bystander effect, managers can remain oblivious to issues that are well-understood by everyone on their teams. As an HR professional, you should ensure that managers are asking for regular feedback from each of their employees and that employees have the opportunity to share issues, concerns, and ideas.
The Accounts Receivable department at UltraFoundry, Inc. is enormous. At any given time, about 40 employees report to Kim, the department manager. Over the past six months, the team’s computers have gradually slowed down. Programs that used to launch in seconds now take minutes. The startup process has become so slow that many employees don’t bother shutting their PCs down before they leave for the night so they won’t have to sit through the bootup process again in the morning.
Everyone knows about this issue. Well, everyone except Kim. No individual on Kim’s team feels the need to report the issue to her because each employee assumes that someone else will do it. What’s more, because “everyone knows about it,” many employees assume that Kim must be aware of the problem already and is choosing to ignore it.
Kim is watching productivity and morale slip on her team, but has no idea what’s causing the problem.
The more widely shared and understood an issue, concern, or idea is among a group of employees, the less likely it is that any individual employee will report it to a manager. This is called the “voice bystander effect.” Each employee assumes that someone else will report the information to the manager or that someone else already has.
The voice bystander effect is especially potent when the manager shares high-quality relationships with some of their employees. Members of the team assume that those favored employees are already passing along crucial information to the manager.
As a result of the voice bystander effect, managers can remain oblivious to problems or concerns that are universally understood by everyone on their teams. The same phenomenon can affect suggestions for improvement: a given solution or improvement may be obvious to everyone on a team except the manager.
The researchers in this study found evidence for the voice bystander effect in three different studies. The first involved tracking communication patterns in a Fortune 500 company. The second study was a laboratory experiment with college students. Finally, the third study was a laboratory experiment with U.S.-based workers.
Takeaways for the HR Professional
Encourage employees to share feedback with their managers on a regular basis, even if the information they are sharing seems well-known. Encourage employees to “say the obvious” and reward them for it.
Training and encourage managers to seek feedback on “obvious” information through one-on-one meetings with employees, group process improvement and feedback efforts, or through suggestion boxes and other process improvement tools.
Source
Hussain, I., Shu, R., Tangirala, S., & Ekkirala, S. (2019). The Voice Bystander Effect: How Information Redundancy Inhibits Employee Voice. Academy of Management Journal.
