Workplace Spirituality and Organizational Silence A Moderated Mediation Analysis of Psychological Safety and Locus of Control

Abstract

Organizational silence is one of the burning issues of modern organizations, especially in the healthcare facilities of the public sector where free communication is a key to organizational success and safety. Although earlier studies have mostly focused on leadership and structure-related antecedents of silence, there has been a scanty focus on value-based and psychological exposition. To fill this gap, the current paper focuses on the impact of the spirituality at the workplace on organizational silence including locus of control as a mediating variable and psychological safety as a moderating one. The research design was quantitative and cross-sectional as 400 employees in Medical Teaching Institutions in the public sector were used as the subjects.

Validated and established measurement scales were used and the proposed model was subjected to test with the help of Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The evaluation covered measurement model assessment, structural relationships analysis, mediation and moderation analysis. The findings indicate that organizational silence is influenced to a great extent by spirituality in the workplace. The result show that the locus of control plays an important mediating role between workplace spirituality and organizational silence, thus showing that spiritually enriched work places lower silence levels by enhancing the personal sense of control among the employees.

Moreover, psychological safety also plays a significant moderating role in the relationship between workplace spirituality and organizational silence, the extent of its influence is greater when the levels of psychological safety are high. This research offers contributions to the literature of the organizational behavior by enhancing the knowledge on the topic of organizational silence by providing a value-based and psychologically oriented framework. The research provides a more detailed explanation of silence behavior in healthcare settings among public sector by incorporating the concepts of workplace spirituality, locus of control and psychological safety. The results have substantial theoretical and practical implications on how to promote an open communication within organizations and avoid silence.