Silence Is Not Golden--A Study On The Influence Of Employee Silence On Employees’ Time Banditry Behavior

With the advent of the mobile Internet era,the market demand is evolving rapidly.As an important social unit,enterprises are facing increasingly fierce competitive pressure.In the new era,employees,as the source power to promote the development of enterprises and economic society,become the key to maintain the overall competitive vitality of enterprises.As the core resource of an enterprise and the actual executer of organizational operation,employees are often able to find the loopholes in decision-making and the gap between goals in the first time,and urge the enterprise to reassess the situation,improve the working process,prevent crises,and improve the flexibility and effectiveness of the organization through reasonable voice advice.However,in actual organizational work,employees who find problems often do not directly put forward suggestions,but choose to reserve or hide their views,which is a relatively safe way to cope,that is,employees’ silence behavior.As a common and hidden workplace phenomenon in the organization,employee silence will have a negative impact on the organization and individual employees.Previous studies on employee silence mainly focus on the antecedents of employee silence,that is,exploring what factors induce employee silence.However,there are few studies on the outcome variables of silent behavior,especially its impact on individual employee experience and how to produce the impact.In the actual work of enterprises,only when the path and mechanism of employee silence play a role can measures be taken for precise intervention and guidance,so as to prevent the potential harm of employee silence from the source.Moreover,due to the distinct cultural background and value orientation between China and the West,employee silence under the Chinese cultural background may have its unique connotation.Therefore,it is more necessary to explore the consequences and internal mechanism of employee silence based on the Chinese cultural background.Based on this,based on the theory of resource conservation and theoretical derivation,this study builds a moderated mediation model to explore the influence of employee silence on employees’ time encroachment behavior,as well as the mediating effect of psychological ownership and the moderating effect of core self-evaluation,so as to clarify the negative impact of employee silence on individual employees and the harm to the organization.It is of great significance to encourage enterprises to treat the silent behavior carefully,give full play to the potential of talents,and realize the healthy development of employees and enterprises.In this study,employees of Chinese enterprises were selected as research objects at 3 different time points,and 417 valid data were finally matched through questionnaires issued by Credamo,an online data collection platform,and statistical software such as SPSS 26.0 and Mplus 8.3 was used for data processing.Test the main effect,the mediating effect,the moderating effect and the moderated mediating effect.The results show that:(1)employee silence is positively correlated with time encroachment;(2)Employee silence is negatively correlated with psychological ownership;(3)Psychological ownership mediated the positive correlation between employee silence and time encroachment behavior;(4)Core self-evaluation strengthened the negative correlation between employee silence and psychological ownership;(5)Core self-evaluation strengthened the positive correlation between employee silence and time encroachment behavior through psychological ownership.In general,combining with the factors of Chinese organizational culture,this paper systematically explores the effect and path of employee silence in the work situation.From the theoretical perspective,it can expand the knowledge and understanding of the academic circle on employee silence and expand the empirical research on employee silence horizontally.From the perspective of the actual work of the organization,this study describes the negative effects of employee silence and its action path,which can help the enterprise managers to make targeted intervention on this common phenomenon and guide the healthy development of the organization and employees.