Frontline concerns: does silence mean everything is under control?
In a complex organisation, managers depend on information that their dashboards do not always capture. The useful question for SHR's “Management complexe” programme is specific: how can managers tell whether problems are rare or employees are reluctant to report them?
What the literature establishes
Amy C. Edmondson (1999, Administrative Science Quarterly) identifies an association between team psychological safety and learning behaviours, including discussing mistakes and seeking feedback. This safety refers to a shared belief that taking an interpersonal risk within the team does not necessarily lead to punishment or humiliation. It should therefore be confused neither with constant comfort nor with abandoning standards.
Managerial openness beyond the open door
James R. Detert and Ethan R. Burris (2007, Academy of Management Journal) show that managerial openness is associated with employees voicing suggestions for improvement, and that psychological safety plays a role in this relationship. The proposed mechanism concerns the perceived risk of speaking up, not merely the existence of a communication channel. An invitation to report difficulties may therefore lack credibility if the manager's reactions suggest that disagreement will be unwelcome.
The premature conclusion
One might infer that a team reporting more problems necessarily functions better. These studies do not support that conclusion: more reports may reflect greater freedom to speak, an actual deterioration in operations, or both. The managerial task is to examine reported concerns alongside what is actually happening at work. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot settle
These field studies are not experiments that can isolate with certainty the causal effect of a managerial stance. Nor do they justify treating every improvement suggestion as equivalent to a food safety alert or an industrial incident. A reporting register documents concerns that have been voiced; by itself, it does not reveal difficulties that remain unspoken.
A practical check in Fribourg
Within the “Management complexe” programme, SHR could propose an exercise for a bilingual food-processing or industrial company in Fribourg, involving a partner from the local university sector to discuss the protocol, without implying that such a collaboration already exists. For one month, a register accessible in French and German would record each reported difficulty, its date and the response; the measure would be the proportion of reports receiving a reasoned response within five working days, a timeframe proposed for the exercise rather than a scientific standard. That response could announce action, request verification or explain a decision not to intervene, without replacing immediate escalation procedures for emergencies. The result would be verifiable in the register and would indicate how reports are handled, without claiming to measure problems that remain unspoken. To go further: explore the Complex Management training in Fribourg, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Complex Management in Fribourg
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