Keywords

The junior doctor Ida receives a message on her calling device. She runs to the nearest nurse at the hospital ward and urgently asks, “Where is this room?” The display shows a range of letters and numbers that makes no sense to Ida. With the nurse’s help, she eventually locates the room, where they find a pale and lifeless patient. They begin lung–heart compression, but to no avail. The patient is dead and has been so for a while. It appears that he had been left alone and without supervision for a long time.

Ida struggles to make sense of this death. Her supervisor at the hospital encourages her to write a memo about her experience. In it, she describes the events as they unfolded and points out weaknesses in the routines when the responsibility for a patient is transferred from one unit to another. She outlines concrete measures that can improve collaboration between the surgical unit and the medical unit. Messages that have previously been handed over orally need to be put in writing. The coding of rooms for the calling system should be simplified and made more easily understandable. The transition period when patients move from one unit to another should receive additional careful attention.

What now? Ida does not know what to do with her memo. Would anyone be interested in reading her observations and recommendations? Her supervisor encourages her to approach the leader of the medical unit and present her findings. She does so and receives an invitation to present them at a meeting for all the doctors and nurses at the unit. Hesitantly, she says yes. Ida is nervous when the time comes to address this group of people who overall are much more experienced than she is. How will they receive critical input from a junior such as her?

The nervousness evaporates when Ida notices that the audience listens attentively to what she has to say. Her senior colleagues ask her to elaborate and be more specific. An experienced nurse enthusiastically thanks her for the initiative and says, “We have learned a lot from what you have told us now.” The leader of the unit is also supportive and praises her for the effort she has put into the memo and the presentation. From the outset, Ida formulated her reflections as an exercise in personal sensemaking. How was it possible that a patient was left to die alone in a modern and sophisticated hospital, surrounded by top health professionals? Her findings then turned out to be crucial input to improving the communication and collaboration between the surgical and the medical unit at the hospital. Attentive professionals listened to what Ida had to say and used her input as a foundation for strengthening their work routines.

Communication climate in organisations and groups is the topic of this book. I have approached workplaces with a curiosity to learn about their patterns and norms for speaking to each other. Before she spoke up, the junior doctor Ida was uncertain about the quality of the communication climate in the hospital unit where she worked. It turned out that senior leaders and employees welcomed her initiative and were receptive to the message she had to tell them. They appreciated her engagement. Their responses indicate a healthy and open communication climate, one that can foster collaboration, learning, and human flourishing.

The book is a contribution to applied philosophy. My academic background is in philosophy, where I was trained to do conceptual analysis and inquiry. Since 2009, I have worked as a researcher and teacher at a business school, in a department of leadership and organisational behaviour. As a member of this work environment, I have had the opportunity to apply philosophical concepts to understand the workings of organisations, raising questions about how to lead a good working life and stimulate human flourishing in the workplace. Collaboration with colleagues who are not philosophers has taught me to appreciate the way philosophical reflection can feed on empirical research. I have realised that reflections on philosophical questions about the good life and human excellence can gain strength from studies in other academic disciplines. The current book is an attempt to conduct empirically informed applied philosophy. It has a practical orientation, and it is driven by a desire to make a difference in the way people communicate and collaborate in the workplace. I share with other researchers of human agency and motivation a sense of urgency to understand more about what constitutes human excellence, to make us able to address the monumental challenges that humanity is currently facing. Destructive political, social, and environmental developments point to a need for people to mobilise their capabilities to cope with complexity and work well together.

A communication climate manifests in the way leaders and employees in groups and organisations talk to each other in work settings. How do they praise and criticize each other? What are the patterns for sharing knowledge? How high is the threshold for speaking up and expressing disagreement and dissent? How easy is it to ask for help and admit limitations in one’s understanding of tasks? To what extent and in what ways do they celebrate achievements and breakthroughs? I have used some of these questions to explore the communication climate in a group or organisation. The book builds on my Norwegian book on the same topic (Kvalnes 2022) and my previous research on fallibility (Kvalnes 2017). It also draws on and contributes to research on voice climate (Detert and Edmondson 2011; Morrison et al. 2011; Frazier and Bowler 2015), psychological safety (Edmondson 1999, 2018), and ways to foster constructive conversations at work (Edmondson and Besieux 2021).

I have gathered input for the book through a range of channels. Communication climate has been a topic in my teaching and supervision of executive students for several years. In the classroom, these students have shared experiences and narratives about communication climate challenges in their organisations. In their thesis work, they have explored specific aspects of the way people communicate in their organisations. They have made small-scale experiments to test how concrete changes in ways of communicating can influence motivation and collaboration. Supervising their theses has provided me with a variety of insights into the practical challenges associated with communication in organisations. I have also facilitated workshops and seminars in workplaces regarding ways to establish and maintain a constructive communication climate. These processes have provided crucial input to my theorising. Since 2021, I have hosted a podcast devoted to communication climate, where I have invited researchers and practitioners to talk about their findings and experiences. Several of the examples in the book are from podcast guests, including the opening story from Ida, the junior doctor.

Communication climate is a broader concept than voice climate, which is used in research to study shared perceptions among group members of the extent to which they are encouraged to engage in voice behaviour (Frazier and Bowler 2015); that is, presenting “innovative suggestions for change and recommending modifications to standard procedures even when others disagree” (Van Dyne and LePine 1998). Some of the narratives in the book also fit under the heading of voice climate, such as seen in the opening example involving Ida. Other examples go beyond that construct by illustrating and highlighting the ways members of a group can encourage, energise, and support each other; ask for and offer help; share experiences of having made mistakes; and so on.

Psychological safety is a concept that describes the perceptions of the consequences of taking interpersonal risk in a work context (Edmondson 1999, 2018; Edmondson and Lei 2014). The level of psychological safety helps to explain decisions about offering help, sharing doubts, making suggestions for improvements, and being open or closed about mistakes. When contemplating such initiatives, the decision-maker might consider the likelihood that they will lead to personal repercussions and sanctions, and so be concerned about the level of psychological safety in the work environment.

Voice climate is a narrower concept than psychological safety (Frazier and Bowler 2015). Both are concerned with shared perceptions of the risk involved in taking an initiative at work, but the latter takes a broader view in that it includes risk in asking colleagues for help, sharing doubt, and being open about mistakes. However, voice behaviour and voice climate only address the risk involved in making suggestions for improvements even when others may disagree.

Communication climate is an even broader concept than psychological safety because it involves more than just decisions featuring risk assessments. Many decisions on whether to express one’s views or remain silent are unaffected by risk. People decide to become involved or not for a range of other reasons than the likelihood that it might be harmful to them. I will take psychological safety to be one of several qualities that can characterise a communication climate.

The communication climate in an organisation affects how colleagues give each other praise and support as well as the ways they provide criticism and dissent towards the other. Manifestations of communication climate can be seen in the ways colleagues share knowledge or keep it to themselves. The communication climate influences the threshold for suggesting improvements to current practices, speaking up about perceived wrongdoings, and expressing disagreement with colleagues or leaders. During work processes, the communication climate affects how easy or difficult it is to seek help from colleagues, admit mistakes, express uncertainty, and voice disagreement. Perceptions of the quality of the communication climate in a particular group or organisation can vary significantly. A leader may consider the quality excellent, whereas the people working in the leader’s unit may think otherwise. The threshold for walking into the leader’s office with bad news or critical concerns about an ongoing project can look higher from outside the office than it does from the inside.

The communication climate in an organisation affects the long-term patterns in the way leaders and employees typically address each other at work, as well as the ways in which they tend to provide support and encouragement or criticism and friction. When we obtain a glimpse of the activities that go on in an organisation on a particular day and witness one specific exchange of words between colleagues, it is tempting to draw conclusions about the communication climate. However, we have only witnessed the communication weather in that one situation. One exchange may not be typical of how people speak to each other in the organisation. Take the example of Ida and her courageous presentation of weaknesses in the collaboration between the medical unit and the surgical unit. Her colleagues listened attentively to what she had to say and expressed gratitude for her effort. It is all very positive, but all we can conclude from this isolated event is that the communication weather was good on this occasion. Conclusions about the communication climate will depend on more observation and the extent to which recurring patterns and routines are in place for encouraging and listening to critical voices.

The examples in this book are mostly of well-functioning practices where people speak up at work and provide constructive praise or criticism, and their efforts are well received. My approach takes inspiration from the research tradition of positive organisational scholarship, where researchers deliberately explore practices that strengthen human capabilities and cultivate extraordinary human performances on individual, group, and organisational levels (Cameron and Dutton 2003). It also builds on assumptions embedded in the tradition of appreciative inquiry, the value of studying and learning from the best practices in organisations (Cooperrider and Srivastva 1987).

At the core of my interest in communication climate lies a fascination with what we can call the silence mystery. It is similar to what Edmondson (2018) has called an epidemic of silence. Why do people keep silent when they can speak up and create a positive change in the situation in front of them? For example, they can use their voice to stop the continuation of a negative set of events, as in Ida’s case, or their intervention can bring attention to promising alternatives or highlight a positive set of events. The initiative can be to express praise and acknowledgement of others’ achievements. It is an opportunity to energise one or more individuals by praising their efforts. People can be positioned to make suggestions for significant improvements and do considerable good, but choose to keep saying nothing. Why?

A range of personal and systemic explanations underlies the silence mystery. The silence is particularly mysterious in cases where it seems that it is quite safe to speak up because the personal risk is low. The following are among the reasons I have heard people provide for their silence:

  • He has too much to worry about already. I do not want to add to his troubles.

  • I have done it before, and she does not really listen to what I have to say.

  • He seems to be very keen on this solution, and not open to alternatives at this moment.

  • It will just be too embarrassing.

  • The others here are much more experienced than I am. I have probably misunderstood the situation. Even if I have not, they can give a more capable response.

  • Other people here are more knowledgeable, and they are silent, so everything is probable fine.

  • The communication climate here is excellent, so if there had been a reason to address this issue, someone else would have done it a long time ago.

  • She gets so sarcastic when people disagree with her, and the conversation will turn unpleasant.

  • On the previous occasion, he did not say thank you.

  • If I speak up now, I will be handed the responsibility for fixing things, and I already have too much to do.

  • It is my idea. If I share it with colleagues, one or more of them are likely to claim it for themselves.

The variety in the reasons people provide for remaining silent even when they have something important to say is striking.

Another set of explanations of the silence mystery points to systemic challenges that can occur in dyadic relations, as outlined by Hämäläinen and Saarinen (2006) and Sasaki et al. (2015). Each person in the dyad may hold back due to assumptions about the other person’s willingness to engage. Both may mistakenly think, “This person is probably not interested in my views on the matter, so I will remain silent.”

Both are interested in and would benefit from breaking the silence but are trapped in a system of mistrust and inactivity. Here, we have a system of holding back that the individuals can become aware of and challenge. As with other silence mysteries, an unhealthy deadlock is in place, a misunderstanding waiting to be exposed and overcome. Systems of holding back can be fixed or fluid (Kvalnes 2017), depending on the histories of the relations between the people involved. A fixed system is one that has existed unquestioned for a long time. The habits and routines for communicating have hardened through repetition. A fluid system is normally younger and easier to challenge and overthrow.

Breaking the silence is not always the optimal way forward. As Edmondson and Smith (2006) noted, silence can be a better option than speaking without self-discipline and talking past each other. It is in line with the reflections in this book that the alternatives of speaking up and remaining silent both can have positive and negative effects, as Edmondson and Besieux (2021) outlined in their productive conversation matrix.

This book is organised into three parts. Part 1 (Chaps. 1–6) addresses why communication climate is important in organisations. In work settings, we can encounter what I will call critical quality moments, situations where the communication climate is put to the test. Will anyone speak up in the meeting and point out the weakness in the proposed plan for the way forward? Will anyone take an initiative to acknowledge the efforts from the team who just presented their excellent solution to a difficult challenge? In a critical quality moment, the next event to happen determines the quality of the work to follow. The setting may be one where the possibility for constructive communication agency exists for only a few seconds. The meeting is ending, and people are about to rise to leave the room. Now is the time to speak. In a few seconds, it will be too late. When many people are present and are in a position to take an initiative, bystander effects and group thinking may cause passivity. Another cause for concern is the phenomenon of inattentional blindness. People tend to see and notice only the aspects of a situation to which they are attending and be blind to other aspects. These situations call for intervention from those who sense that colleagues have blind spot issues. It can be helpful to identify possible critical quality moments in a group or organisation in advance and identify strategies and scripts for coping with them.

Part 2 (Chaps. 7–11) identifies five aspects of communication climate at its best: (a) Ideas and suggestions are exposed to friendly friction, well-meaning attempts to strengthen them through exposure to criticism. (b) An optimal communication climate has a tolerance for false alarms, a concept connected to a distinction between active speech mistakes (saying something that turns out to be mistaken or wrong) and passive speech mistakes (not saying something that should have been said). (c) People sense that they can speak up and articulate their views even if the majority in the group means otherwise, without fear of sanctions, and so experience psychological safety. (d) There is a scope for agency in place, opportunities for people to take initiatives beyond their specified roles or instructions in the group or organisation. When something unexpected and outside the script of their job responsibilities happens, they nevertheless act. (e) It is common to energise each other through encouragement and praise, and push plus buttons.

Communication ethics is the topic of Part 3 (Chaps. 12–14). Decisions about whether to speak up often have a significant ethical dimension. Communication ethics encompasses both freedom of speech (i.e., a freedom to articulate one’s opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation or censorship) and speech responsibility (i.e., a responsibility for consequences of speaking up or remaining silent). If we only focus on freedom of speech, people can justify to themselves and others why they remained silent in a critical situation where they could have taken an initiative to stop a negative chain of events. Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to speak. With speech responsibility in place, we can explain why the appeal to freedom of speech is not sufficient for an ethical judgement of what one should do in a situation where it is possible to influence the outcome by speaking up. A chapter on moral psychology outlines how decision-makers can experience moral dissonance when they are ordered or are tempted to do something that goes against their moral convictions. They can then either turn away from and reject the alternative or engage in a process of moral neutralisation, a term criminologists Sykes and Matza (1957) introduced for finding excuses and justification for why it is acceptable to act in ways that at first glance appears to conflict with one’s moral convictions. The communication climate at work affects whether there is scope for dissent towards the neutralisation attempts. Whistleblowing is the topic of the final chapter of this part. It addresses how a lack of scope for addressing questionable behaviour in an organisation can lead to whistleblowing initiatives, and the concern that channels for anonymous reporting can be misused, since the messengers can hide their identities.

The book ends with a separate chapter presenting suggestions for further research and interventions regarding communication climate in organisations. I have experienced that the topic can be at the heart of fruitful research, academic theses, and student assignments. I round the book off with suggestions for researchers, students, and supervisors who are interested in designing further studies on communication climate.