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Can Silence Be Morally Right? Metaphysical Foundations for Employee Silence

Employee silence refers to a conscious decision made by an employee to remain silent. Scholarship in management and organization studies has mainly researched employee silence as a barrier to management excellence. Scholarship on employee silence is carried out mainly within the disciplines of psychology and sociology. There is a lack of philosophical inquiry into employee silence, both in organization studies as well as in philosophy of management. This paper provides a philosophical inquiry into employee silence through the metaphysical understandings of self and life from a particular philosophical tradition, namely the Indian epic of Ramayana. The paper discusses how three major themes in the Ramayana provide a normative foundation for silence: dharma, forgiveness, and the father figure. Whilst the extant literature on employee silence conceptualizes the driving forces in terms of negative immediate relational impacts, our inquiry in this paper suggests how metaphysical understandings of self and life can cast silence as morally correct behavior instead of moral failure.

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