Effect of Organizational Silence on Organizational Cynicism: an Empirical Study on Healthcare Industry

Abstract

Today's dynamism and competitive business environments result with the alteration change of working conditions and as well as the emergence of new concepts. Due to the increasing competition, employees experience higher performance towards productivity and performance. Therefore, based on difficulties and pressures of the work conditions, the employees may exhibit negative attitudes towards the organization. One of the negative attitudes towards the organization is the concept of organizational cynicism that takes its roots from Ancient Greek Times and involves negative attitudes towards the organization such critical, pessimistic and disdain (Turkoz, Polat & Cosar, 2013; Sagir & Oguz, 2012). On the other hand, the employees can hide the knowledge and ideas they have consciously and deliberately (Kilicler, Harbalioglu, 2014; Aktas & Simsek, 2015). This can lead to organizational silence behavior. In recent days, the healthcare industry is considered to be more active in service production, effective usage of human resources and competitive conditions compared to the others. In this context, this study is conducted on nurses as the most important actors of the healthcare sector. The survey that includes organizational cynicism and organizational silence expressions items was carried out on 131 nurses in a training and research hospital in Istanbul. The findings of the study are considered to be useful for the field of organizational behavior and management practitioners. Correlation analysis, regression analysis, and one-way ANOVA test are used for testing our hypotheses. This study aims to examine the effect of organizational silence behavior on organizational cynicism. As a result of this study, it was observed that the organizational silence behaviors have an effect on organizational cynicism attitudes (p <.01, R-2 =.09). However, it was not calculated this effect too much. Silence behaviors describe the rate of 9 % cynicism attitudes. In addition, a positive correlation was found between two variables at moderate level (p <0.01, r = .30). The most powerful relationship was found in organizational silence and also organizational cynicism in emotional dimension (p < 0.01, r = .30). Generally, it was observed that nurses do not exhibit organizational silence behavior ((-)= 2,66). At the same time, it has also been found that organizational cynicism attitude is to be negatively ((-)= 2,77). Another finding is the study there is no difference in the cynicism according to demographic variables. It was only found significant differences in occupational seniority for nurses' cynicism. In this context, the results were considered to be useful to practitioners who are working on organizational behavior and managerial sense. Especially, defining and identifying these behaviors and attitudes will be useful for managers in reducing these behaviors in organizations.