Woes of silence: the role of burnout as a mediator between silence and employee outcomes

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the impact of employee silence on performance and turnover intentions. In addition, it seeks to explore the mediating role of burnout in the link between employee silence, and three employee outcomes-supervisor-rated task/contextual performance and self-reported turnover intentions. Design/methodology/approach Using survey questionnaire design, this paper collected data from 508 telecom engineers and their immediate supervisors and analyzed the result using structural equation modeling (SEM) technique, bootstrapping. Findings Results reveal that employee silence leads to burnout which results in debilitating employee performance, increase in withdrawal behaviors and turnover intentions; burnout mediates these direct relationships. The findings have implications for organizational behavior (OB) research. Moreover, the study found that silence has more pronounced negative effect on employee performance and positive impact on turnover intentions through mediation of job burnout. Practical implications The study helps managers identify the psychological ramifications of defensive silence and the underlying mechanism that connects this to employee outcomes. It also highlights the plausible danger zones in which the employees lose self-expression and show symptoms of exhaustion and cynicism, thus ultimately affecting their performance and withdrawal behaviors. Originality/value The current study contributes to employee behavior literature by considering silence as an organizational loss in the backdrop of the COR theory which initiates loss process that leads to further losses in individuals.