Research On The Factors That Affect Middle-level Manager's Silence In Corporations

The behavior that individuals retain ideas and opinions consciously for various reasons after finding the potential problems existing in organization is very common. The negative effect is harmful to the health development of the company. Therefore, silence behavior has become a new research field which attracts many scholars.There is little research focus on middle-level managers while there are many researches are focus on the employees of grass roots. The essential differences between middle-level management and grass roots level employees are they concerned on profound factors when behave their silence behavior. Therefore, this article based on the role of middle-level managers combined indiviual factors and environmental factors they perceived to explore the effects on their silence behavior from a new perspective differs from previous studies. The specific research processes and main results are as follows:PhaseⅠ:Firstly, author summed up the main factors that affect middle-level mangers'silence through literature anlaysis and open-ended questionnaire. Secondly, selecting the key variables including management self-efficacy of manager, supervisor support and organizational commitment.PhaseⅡ:Author established a questionnaire to explore the effect of the key variables mentioned above based on management self-efficacy questionnaire,employee silence questionnaire,supervisor support questionnaire and organizational commitment questionnaire. Statistical results showed that the reliability and validity are good. Through exploring statistical differences of middle-level managers'silence behavior on different population and organization dimensions, we concluded that:①Middle-level managers of different sex showed significant difference on defensive silence. Female get higher average on defensive silence than male;②The differences among middle-level managers owing different working years are significant;③The silence phenomenon of middle-level manager is more serious than foreign-funded enterprises.PhaseⅢ:According to correlation analysis and Regression analysis, Author got conclusions as follows:①Management self-efficacy and its sub-dimensions among which self-efficacy have significant negative impacts on middle-level managers' silence;②Supervisor Support and its two sub-dimensions have significant negative impacts on middle level managers'silence;②Organization commitment and its three sub-dimensions have significant negative influences on middle-level managers' silence.On account of above conclusions, we put forward specific solutions as below to relieve middle-level managers'silence based on individual leve,Senior manager level and organization level:①For the individual level:Human Resources Department should construct middle management competency model and select candidates those who have high level management self-efficacy by using recruitment technology, and then eliminate the candidates who are lack of responsibility. It is essential to invite external professionals to improve middle level managers'capacity by training and relieve their silence behavior②For senior managers level:firstly, they should learn to listen and adopt those constructive suggestions with a broad mind. To those people whose idea can't be adopted,senior managers should confirm their attitude and explain the back story.Secondly, senior managers should shorten the psychological distance between them in order to let the middle level managers reveal their true opinions in harmonious atmosphere;③For the organizational level:First of all,enterprises should combine personal goal and company's target together to form a community of interests by developing reasonable career development plan for middle level managers. Secondly, enterprises should foster their responsibility to avoid their ignoring behavior. Finally, middle-level managers should be authorized to give suggestions. Establishing formal upload information channels and setting up scientific mechanisms and proposal system should be implemented.