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✪ huang gui xu zhenyi wang sitong yan yue

school of management, sun yat-sen university

✪ fu chunguang

school of marxism, sun yat-sen university

【introduction】china's officialdom culture believes that wise leaders are often taciturn. the higher the position, the more frugal they are with words.from the perspective of leadership, this is conducive to establishing authority and cultivating employees' upward understanding. why is this kind of official culture so prevalent in china?"upward understanding"can the training of employees truly improve their abilities?

through interviews with 45 corporate management samples, this article finds that employees' upward perception is the premise and soil for the existence of leadership silence.more than 80% of the respondents believed that moderate silence from leaders can train or improve their comprehension abilities.however, not all leadership silence is based on the consideration of improving work efficiency. this article divides leadership silence into five types: prosocial, testing, defensive, authoritative, and machiavellian.prosocial leadership silenceit is based on altruism or cooperation, mainly manifested in "listening to subordinates' opinions better", "training subordinates" and "showing trust in subordinates";testing leadership silenceit is a relatively covert way of examining and testing employees, and using this as one of the bases for employing subordinates;defensive leadership silencethe intention is to "avoid unnecessary responsibilities" and "avoid conflicts that are disadvantageous to oneself";authoritative leadership silenceit is to adopt the silent behavior of "not caring" towards those disappointing subordinates. silence can play the role of "criticism" and "punishment";machiavellian leadership silenceit refers to the silent behavior adopted by leaders to maintain personal power and dignity. the main motivation is the fear of losing control and maintaining authority.

this article points out that employees' upward understanding will also affect the silence of leaders. the more silent the leader is, the more employees need to understand on their own.the more insightful the employees are, the more likely the leaders will remain silent.in high power distance organizations,the trend of obedience to superiors prevails, and employees will focus their main energy and understanding on their leaders.in this case, upward savvy not only fails to improve organizational efficiency, but may also trigger competition among management superiors.therefore, leaders in organizations should use silence appropriately to encourage the positive aspects of employees' upward enlightenment and suppress its negative aspects.

a study on the relationship between leadership silence and employees' upward understanding

▍ introduction

huang gui found that in my country's management practice, silent behavior is common among corporate leaders, and based on this, he proposed the research concept of leadership silence. on this basis, liu jun explored the influencing factors of leadership silence (employees' upward trust in leaders and employee cynicism), mediating factors (leader self-efficacy and leader psychological safety) and moderating factors (gender). however, there are currently no relevant research results on the outcome variables of leadership silence, especially the impact on employees. what impact will leadership silence have on employees? theories such as high-context culture, social orientation, power distance orientation and paternalistic leadership can help us explore the answer to the question.

chinese people have always advocated "euphemism and implicitness" in speaking, and tend to use obscure and indirect ways to convey their intentions to the other party in interpersonal communication.therefore, being able to hear other people's implicit meanings and ambiguous expressions is the basis for establishing good interpersonal relationships.in the interactions between superiors and subordinates, this type of communication means that the leader does not directly express his or her wishes and opinions, but must let his or her subordinates appreciate his or her "good intentions."the research on paternalistic leadership based on chinese culture has similar findings. the way chinese leaders interact with their subordinates is often not to release information easily, to be vague, not to state their true intentions, and to require subordinates to"ask indirectly and understand the boss's intention."

in the verification research of followership, domestic scholars found that followership characteristics in the chinese context are different from those in the west, such as "cognitive understanding" and "intentional understanding". coincidentally, huang gui also found that leaders with silent behavior usually use "hints" or "pointing to the point" when dealing with subordinates, and sometimes even express their opinions by not expressing their opinions. the chinese people's authority orientation, other orientation, relationship orientation and high power distance culture are also different.employees must have a certain level of understanding. they are submissive and worship the authority of their leaders, believing that they are "omnipotent" and dare not disobey them. they are also accustomed to taking care of their leaders' face, so they are willing to "understand" and adapt to the silence of their leaders.therefore, chinese leaders often adopt a concise approach to leadership activities, and their unintentional words and deeds can also serve as a guide for their subordinates' actions.

although the above research results did not explicitly propose the research concept of employee upward savvy, nor did they clearly indicate the relationship between leadership silence and employee savvy, they did show the following three important clues:first, the phenomenon of leaders in enterprises not making clear statements obviously falls into the category of leadership silence;second, cognitive understanding and intention grasp roughly outlinethe outline of employees' upward savvy, that is, "employees' ability to understand and implement leadership intentions"; third, leaders have strong and obvious requirements for subordinates' understanding,leadership silence and employee understanding are interdependentbased on this, we believe that the reason why leadership silence exists in organizations is because employees can accept leadership silence.

it can be said that the upward understanding of employees is the premise and soil for the existence of leadership silence. the study of the relationship between leadership silence and employee upward understanding is helpful to improve the mechanism of leadership silence on the one hand, and also helps us to determine the effectiveness of leadership silence on the other hand. it has certain theoretical and practical significance. in order to systematically study the impact of leadership silence on employee upward understanding, we first conducted interviews and then conducted a paired questionnaire survey based on the interviews.

▍literature review

given that academic research on silence only focuses on employee silence and organizational silence atmosphere, huang gui proposed the concept of leadership silence and defined leadership silence as "the behavior or phenomenon in which leaders deliberately fail to express their intentions to subordinates in formal contact with them, or are reserved when expressing their intentions." leadership silence is divided into five dimensions: defense, prosociality, testing, machiavellianism, and prestige. liu jun defines leadership silence as "the behavior or phenomenon in which leaders in an organization could have improved the current organizational situation through constructive communication with employees, but chose to remain silent." leadership silence is divided into three dimensions: tacit silence, indifferent silence, and defensive silence. in fact, there is no essential difference between the two definitions. given that huang gui et al.'s definition of leadership silence is relatively broad, there are both positive dimensions, such as prosociality; negative dimensions, such as defense, machiavellianism; and neutral dimensions, such as testing. therefore, this article adopts huang gui's definition of leadership silence and its dimensional division.

since leadership silence is a new research concept, there are few studies on the outcome variables of leadership silence. huang gui has made some inroads into the qualitative research of leadership silence, and believes that leadership silence has both positive effects, such as maintaining organizational harmony, avoiding the adverse effects of gaffes, training employees’ abilities, and better obtaining employees’ opinions; and negative effects, such as causing employees’ worries and suspicions, reducing communication efficiency, and widening the distance between superiors and subordinates.

currently, no research has touched upon the outcome variables of leadership silence, especially its impact on employees. the explicit or implicit clues involved in the research on high-context culture, social orientation, power distance orientation, paternalistic leadership, and followership provide inspiration for our research. in china, insight is an essential skill in interpersonal communication.

in traditional chinese culture (confucianism, buddhism, and taoism), there are descriptions of understanding enlightenment and the ambiguity and abstract expression of daily language. therefore, the receiver's sensitivity and ability to understand implicit semantics become particularly critical. sun longji also has a similar understanding of this.many things can be solved by simply reminding the other party directly, but the chinese keep it in their hearts and feel angry secretly; this is reflected in the interactions between superiors and subordinates. leaders want to be mysterious and never make their wishes clear. they must let their subordinates appreciate the leader's "good intentions."

paternalistic leadership is a leadership style that displays strict discipline and authority, fatherly kindness, and moral integrity in an atmosphere of rule by man. it consists of three dimensions: authoritarian leadership, benevolent leadership, and moral leadership. silin first explored the five characteristics of chinese business leaders, among which tight control refers to the leaders' use of various control techniques, such as not clearly stating their intentions. westwood found seven characteristics of chinese leaders, among which keeping distance means that leaders deliberately keep a distance from their subordinates, do not state their intentions, but require their subordinates to be able to "knock around the bush and understand the intentions of their superiors."

social orientation and high power distance are cultural conditions for the generation of employee savvy. social orientation includes authority orientation, others orientation and relationship orientation. among them, authority orientation includes authority sensitivity, authority worship and authority dependence. chinese people are not only sensitive to authority, but also have a "blind worship" mentality, and are prone to form a "omnipotent authority" mentality. this worship leads to the chinese people's complete and strong psychological dependence on authority. facing authority, people may even have a temporary "psychological incompetence" symptom and completely obey the authority's instructions and ideas. in addition, subordinates' obedience to leaders is also related to the chinese people's social orientation of caring for others and focusing on relationships.when people interact with others, they tend to be too considerate of others' feelings, pay attention to maintaining interpersonal relationships, and are unwilling to offend others. this is reflected in "loyalty and obedience" when interacting with leaders.

followers refer to the behavior of leaders acting on followers. the feedback information provided by followers in terms of attitude, task participation, etc. will change and influence the leader's behavior. chinese scholars have found that followers in the chinese context have different components from those in the west, such as "cognitive understanding" and "execution skills"; "intentional understanding" and "active execution". cognitive understanding refers to the ability to be good at cognition and independent thinking; execution skills are mainly reflected in the flexibility to execute the leader's decision-making instructions; intentional understanding is mainly reflected in the ability to fully understand the leader's potential intentions in arranging work and the ability to understand the leader's instructions without detailed explanation; active execution refers to the various behaviors of followers in overcoming difficulties and striving for excellence in the process of executing the leader's instructions. guo yanhong developed a five-dimensional scale of followership based on chinese culture, which is different from the western one, namely diligence, obedience, aggressiveness, emotional intelligence and citizen behavior.

although the concepts of leadership silence and employee insight were not clearly pointed out in the above studies, nor was the relationship between the two concepts studied in depth, the above studies reflect that employee behavior and ability can be summarized as the construct of employee upward insight; leadership's lack of clear statements generally falls into the category of leadership silence;the vagueness of leadership intentions and subordinates' ability to perceive their superiors' intentions are actually evidence of the relationship between leadership silence and employees' upward enlightenment.especially in the eyes of superiors who tend to be silent, being perceptive and able to read the leader's eyes is a sign of a qualified subordinate.in order to more accurately study the impact of leadership silence on employees' upward perception and the relationship between the two, we conducted a paired questionnaire survey based on interviews and coding and used fsqca software for data processing.

▍an interview study on the impact of leader silence on results

this study interviewed 57 people, including 12 grassroots employees, 15 grassroots managers, 13 middle managers, and 17 senior managers. given that employees' upward savvy is mainly based on managers' requirements and cognition of employees, we only retained 45 managers. the age distribution is wide, ranging from 25 to 50 years old; the industry is diverse (excluding samples from industries with low competition intensity); the samples cover private enterprises, state-owned enterprises, and foreign-funded/joint ventures; the length of service is mainly between 3 and 21 years; the education level is all above undergraduate/college.

this study focuses on the following questions: what are the incidents of leadership silence? what are the considerations for leaders to show leadership silence? the impact of leadership silence? how to better use and deal with leadership silence? for grassroots, middle-level managers and senior executives, we asked them how they felt when faced with the silence of their superiors and whether they would show silence when facing their subordinates; for senior executives, we asked them whether they would show silence.

in the 45 interviews, all the interviewees said that leadership silence is common in their daily work and they have a full understanding and perception of leadership silence. among the 45 interviewees, 24 (53.3%) have a positive attitude towards the consequences of leadership silence, 8 (17.8%) have a neutral attitude, and 13 (28.9%) believe that it has more negative impacts.

the coded data show that the dimensions of leadership silence include the requirements for employee insight; the relationship between employee insight and leadership silence; and the boundaries and scope of the concept of employee upward insight. based on this, we extracted the concept of "employee upward insight", that is, "employees' understanding and execution of leadership intentions", which mainly includes two aspects: intention grasp and efficient work. intention grasp includes understanding of leadership style and leadership requirements, which means that subordinates should not only be familiar with and understand the leader's preferences and requirements, but also be good at understanding the leader's potential expectations and requirements. efficient work includes both the ability of subordinates to understand the leader's intentions and be able to implement them, and the ability to continuously and actively improve their own work capabilities.

adapting to and coping with leadership silence is the main reason for employees' upward savvy, which is different from cognitive savvy, executive skills, intention understanding, and active execution that are generated by following the leadership to achieve common organizational goals with the leadership; it is also different from other research concepts that emphasize the acumen of employees' ability to seize opportunities, intuitive thinking that focuses on thinking processes, emotional intelligence that focuses on emotions, and upward ingratiation that pleases superiors for personal gain. employee upward savvy is a new and independent research concept.

the interview data showed thatmore than 80% of the respondents believed that a leader’s moderate silence could train or improve their comprehension ability and help them better reach a tacit understanding with their leader.when faced with the leader’s silence, subordinates will first guess and ponder, exercising their own “subjective initiative” rather than directly questioning and verifying.

prosocial leadership silence is a silent behavior that retains relevant information and opinions from the perspective of organizational harmony and employee interests, based on altruism or cooperation. it is mainly manifested in "listening better to subordinates' opinions", "cultivating and training subordinates" and "showing trust in subordinates".since prosocial leadership silence is a conscious ignorance of the leader, that is, a silent behavior of deliberately putting aside one's own opinions and encouraging employees to exercise their subjective initiative, it is obviously conducive to increasing employees' sense of self-efficacy.

testing leadership silence is a more covert way to observe and test employees.leaders will not make clear statements on some events to test whether employees have the initiative, enthusiasm and loyalty expected by the leaders, and whether they have the ability to grasp the intentions of the leaders, and use this as one of the bases for appointing subordinates.in order to gain the appreciation of leaders and successfully complete their work tasks, employees must constantly become familiar with and understand the leadership style and requirements, grasp the leadership's intentions, work hard and consciously improve their work capabilities.

defensive leadership silence is mainly the silence behavior of leaders in order to protect their own interests from being harmed, with the intention of "avoiding unnecessary responsibilities" and "avoiding conflicts that are disadvantageous to themselves".first, in specific management practices, in many cases the leader's unintentional words can also become the guiding ideology of subordinates. in order to avoid unnecessary responsibilities, leaders are reluctant to speak casually to prevent their subordinates from "taking advantage of them"; secondly, in order to maintain their own authority and distance themselves from their subordinates, leaders are reluctant to easily reveal their opinions; finally, in order to avoid contradictions and conflicts that are disadvantageous to themselves, leaders often avoid conflicts by keeping silent. this requires subordinates to carefully distinguish the different intentions of the leader's silence to avoid being harmed by rules or unspoken rules.

the authoritarian leadership silence is the leader's silent behavior of "not caring" about those subordinates who disappoint him.its main contents are: subordinates should be able to "guess" and "understand" the intentions of their leaders, and silence can play the role of "criticism" and "punishment". faced with this kind of silence, generally speaking, the punished employees will first try to guess and figure out the intentions of their leaders, adapt to the silence of their leaders, and finally understand the intentions of their leaders.this silence will not only serve as a warning and punishment to the employees who suffer such punishment, but will also serve as a model for their colleagues around them.this will undoubtedly enable subordinates to actively and more clearly understand the benefits of leadership intentions and encourage them to actively develop upward understanding.

machiavellian leadership silence refers to the silence that leaders take in order to maintain their personal power and authority. the main motivation is the fear of losing control and maintaining authority.the machiavellian leadership silence requires employees to show savvy at appropriate times, and sometimes requires employees to have high savvy so that the leader can hint to the employees to do something that cannot be said.sometimes, machiavellian silence limits employees' understanding, preventing them from becoming too understanding and seeing through their own conspiracies.to further verify the results of the coded data, we collected questionnaire data and analyzed them using fsqca.

▍a study on the relationship between leadership silence and employees' upward understandingresearch

1. analytical techniques

this study uses the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method (fsqca) to test the above hypothesis. fsqca is a research method that integrates both quantitative and qualitative approaches. fuzzy evaluation uses precise digital means to process fuzzy evaluation objects, and can make a relatively scientific, reasonable, and practical quantitative evaluation of data with fuzzy information. chang pointed out that almost all social science theories are formulated based on set relationships. fsqca is a suitable tool that can be used to determine the causal relationship that occurs in the real world.

the basic principles of fsqca are set theory, formal logic, boolean operations, and fuzzy functions. the evaluation result is a vector, not a point value, and contains richer information. different from statistical inference based on large samples, the qca method is also applicable to small sample research. since this study explores the impact of the five dimensions of leadership silence on employees' upward life, fsqca is a suitable tool to test our hypothesis.

2. variable measurement

all variables were measured using a 5-point likert scale, with “1” representing strongly disagree and “5” representing strongly agree, and the larger the number, the higher the degree of agreement.

the leader silence scale selected the further improved 5-dimensional leader silence scale (employee version), and the scale cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.865>0.70. the scale has a total of 21 questions, including 3 pro-social questions, 4 test questions, 4 defense questions, 5 power questions, and 5 prestige silence questions. the representative items are, "sometimes, leaders do not express their opinions, prompting subordinates with ideas to think"; "sometimes, leaders do not express their opinions clearly to find out who can grasp his/her intentions well"; "usually, when facing subordinates with general relationships, leaders try to say as little as possible"; "sometimes, leaders implicitly signal subordinates to do something to facilitate their freedom of movement"; "leaders no longer criticize those disappointing subordinates."

the upward understanding of employees was measured using a scale compiled by huang gui, with a cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.873>0.70. the scale has four items, namely "he/she can draw inferences from one example and complete the task without me having to worry too much"; "he/she can perceive changes in the environment and grasp the right measure of doing things"; "he/she can quickly understand my way of doing things and complete the work smoothly"; "he/she is good at guessing the boss's intentions and understanding my potential intentions".

3. distribution and collection of questionnaires

this study attempts to explore the impact of leadership silence on employees' upward perception. in order to avoid common method variance (cmv) and reduce the interference of organization-related control variables on the study, combined with the characteristics of qca being suitable for small samples, this study collected a paired sample of managers and employees of an electrical appliance manufacturing company in a certain city. this company has a complete organizational structure and the overall quality of its personnel is high. the questionnaire was distributed on the spot. first, with the help of university resources, the support of the company's senior managers was obtained to determine the list of departments and personnel that could participate in the survey. the number of subordinates corresponding to each manager is different. we selected the subordinates and their number corresponding to each department manager according to the number of people in the department and the principle of sampling.

during the survey, we first asked managers to fill out the "manager questionnaire" and indicate the name of the subordinate they evaluated; then we asked the corresponding subordinates to fill out the "employee questionnaire" and ensured that the subordinates did not know the evaluation of their direct superiors. in order to further ensure the validity of the data, we emphasized the instructions such as "the questionnaire survey is anonymous, the survey results are only used for academic research, and we guarantee that all the information you provide will be kept strictly confidential" before filling out the questionnaire and in the instructions of the questionnaire. during the distribution process, a gift was prepared for each subject, and each pair of paired questionnaires from managers and employees was collected, and a number was added in the upper right corner of the questionnaire homepage to ensure the accuracy of the pairing.

in the questionnaire collection stage, invalid questionnaires were eliminated, such as those with more than half of the "uncertain" options, more than half of the blank items, or questionnaires with obvious regularity in the answers, leaving 45 pairs of valid questionnaires. among them, there were 45 manager questionnaires and 178 employee questionnaires. the basic situation of the employee sample is that males accounted for 48.9% and females accounted for 51.1%; those under 30 years old accounted for 45.6%, those aged 31-40 accounted for 33.7%, and those over 40 years old accounted for 20.7%; undergraduates accounted for 78.7%, high school/secondary school accounted for 19.6%, and masters accounted for 1.7%; the paired samples were mainly functional departments and r&d departments. the situation of the manager sample: males accounted for 60%, females accounted for 40%; 25-30 years old accounted for 11.1%, 31-40 years old accounted for 53.3%, and those over 40 years old accounted for 35.6%; bachelor's degree accounted for 88.9%, and master's degree accounted for 11.1%.

4. data analysis and results

the scale reliability, mean, standard deviation and correlation coefficient of each variable are shown in table 3. the reliability of the total scale of leadership silence and the subscales of each dimension is good, and the reliability of the employee upward perception scale is good.

to use fsqca to infer causal relationships, it is necessary to convert the data of all research variables into fuzzy sets. in order to convert the 5-point likert scale score into a fuzzy set membership score, it is necessary to calibrate the membership degree of the variable case set to obtain a fuzzy set score ranging from 0.00 to 1.00. we calibrated "strongly disagree", "disagree", "uncertain", "agree", and "strongly agree" to 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, and 1, respectively.

according to the requirements of fuzzy set analysis, necessary condition analysis is required before sufficient condition analysis. necessary condition means that if condition a exists, condition b must exist, but the existence of condition b does not necessarily guarantee the existence of condition a, then condition a is a necessary condition for condition b. before performing fuzzy set truth table program analysis, the consistency threshold of necessary conditions is set to 0.8, that is, if more than 80% of the result variable belongs to a condition variable, then this condition variable is a necessary condition for the result variable. the specific analysis results are shown in table 4.

as can be seen from the above table, the consistency scores of prosociality and testing are both greater than 0.8, indicating that these two dimensions of leadership silence are necessary conditions for employees' upward comprehension and have a positive impact on employees' upward comprehension.

configuration analysis is to explore multiple concurrent causal relationships. each configuration is a causal path, which means that there can be different, mutually non-exclusive explanations for the same result. when performing configuration analysis, we deleted the configurations that only appeared once according to the suggestions of rihoux and ragin. the remaining valid configurations covered 95% of the cases, meeting the requirement of covering at least 75% of the cases. the qca analysis program produces three types of solutions: complex solutions, simple solutions, and intermediate solutions. generally speaking, intermediate solutions are better than complex solutions and simple solutions. the specific software analysis results are shown in table 5:

as can be seen from the table above, the consistency of the six configurations is greater than the threshold of 0.8, indicating that the six configurations constitute sufficient conditions for promoting employees' upward understanding. the overall consistency of all configurations is greater than the threshold of 0.8, and the overall coverage rate reaches 0.88, indicating that the six configurations have a strong explanatory power for the results. of course, leadership silence is not the only condition for promoting employees' understanding, but leadership silence will promote employees' upward understanding.

from m5, we can see that when leaders show prosocial, testing, and machiavellian silence at the same time, it will promote employees' upward understanding. from m6, we can see that when leaders show defensive silence, machiavellian silence, and authoritative silence at the same time, and do not show prosocial silence, it will promote employees' upward understanding. this shows thatdefensive silence, machiavellian silence, and authoritarian silence require certain conditions to have a positive impact on employees' upward perception.

▍discussion and management implications

in the existing research, there are many studies on leadership silence and employee insight, and there are also research fragments on the relationship between the two. although the existing research has not been based on the clear concept of leadership silence and employee upward insight, these studies have also provided useful inspiration for our further research.

based on literature review and interview coding, we found that all dimensions of leadership silence will positively affect employees' upward understanding. using fsqca software to analyze the paired questionnaires we collected, we found that prosocial and testing leadership silence is a necessary condition for employees' upward understanding and will positively affect employees' upward understanding. when leaders show prosocial, testing and machiavellian silence at the same time, it will promote employees' upward understanding. when leaders show defensive, machiavellian and authoritative silence at the same time, and do not show prosocial silence, it will promote employees' upward understanding. both the interview method and the fsqca research method verify the relationship between leadership silence and employees' upward understanding, and the conclusions are consistent.

although employee insight is largely a positive trait, insightful employees are not only sensitive and perceptive to interpersonal relationships and work tasks, but are also good at summarizing and refining problems and are good at drawing inferences from one instance to another.however, in organizations with high power distance, the trend of obedience to superiors prevails, and employees are overly sensitive to the words and deeds of their leaders, and will focus their main energy and understanding on their leaders. at this time, the upward understanding of employees will not only fail to improve the efficiency of the organization, but may also trigger competition among management superiors in the organization.therefore, as a leader in an organization, you should use silence appropriately to encourage the positive aspects of employees' upward enlightenment and suppress its negative aspects.

of course, this article only studies the impact of leadership behavior on employee behavior, and does not study the impact of employee behavior on leadership behavior.we believe that employees' upward comprehension will also affect the silence of leaders. the more silent a leader is, the more employees need to understand on their own; and the more comprehensible the employees are, the more likely the leader will be silent.in the future, research on the interaction between leadership silence and employee upward insight can be strengthened. at the same time, research on the source, generation and influence of employee upward insight also needs to be further strengthened.