Insecure Managers Don’t Want Your Suggestions

Organizational studies show that employee voice — speaking up with ideas for improvement to those with the power to make changes — helps managers and companies perform better. This is not a controversial finding, nor is it particularly surprising that organizations in which people speak up outperform those in which ideas are stifled. After all, those on the front lines are typically best positioned to generate ideas to make the organization more effective. What is surprising, however, is that many managers actually work hard to avoid voice — they fail to solicit ideas for improvement, punish those who speak up, or both. We decided to find out not only which managers are reticent to hear about ideas but also why.

Before we started our study, our intuition was that, in general, some managers feel more secure in their roles and therefore see suggestions for improvement as a positive way for them and the organization to get better. And that those who feel insecure — those who don’t feel competent (or lack what psychologists call “self-efficacy” in their roles) feel that employee suggestions are a personal and negative commentary on their ability to do their job. In short, they feel threatened by people asking for changes to be made and send signals that opinions aren’t welcome or actively discourage employees from speaking up as a way to defend their egos.

Indeed, this is just what we found in our study at a large multi-national oil company. We surveyed 41 managers and their 148 employees and found that managers who didn’t feel competent were less likely than others to solicit or accept employee input. This is particularly surprising, as these managers were highly educated, highly trained professionals in the hard sciences (chemists, geologists, petroleum engineers, etc.) and business (procurement officers, accountants, etc.) who should know the personal and organizational benefits of accessing potentially innovative ideas. Still, their egos got in the way.

This may seem like despairing news for anyone who works for a boss who doesn't feel competent in his or her job and is therefore ego-defensive. But there are ways to influence an insecure manager’s willingness to hear employees’ ideas. In a follow-up experiment, we found that allowing managers to “self-affirm” — think and write about their core values (an exercise psychologists use to reduce ego defensiveness) — made these managers more willing to solicit employee input, and more likely to validate and reward employees who spoke up. In fact, the act of affirming their values negated the effect of their lack of competence.

In other words, providing an opportunity for managers to validate an important and valuable aspect of their personal identity inoculates them, so to speak, from the potential threat of employee opinions.

So what should you do if your manager is stifling your voice? Here are a few suggestions.

• Take steps to disarm defensiveness: When you do speak up, consider doing it in private, rather than in front of others. This will help your manager to “save face” and minimize any feelings of threat.

• Give your manager a morale boost before offering constructive criticism:Compliments can go a long way. Highlighting your manager’s strengths affirms his or her ego and may reduce the degree to which he or she is threatened by your opinion.

• Pitch the positive: Frame improvements by simultaneously emphasizing potential gains for the company and deemphasizing your managers’ liability. And certainly, avoid implying that the situation that needs improving is your manager’s fault.

Of course, it’s not all on the employee to make things better. Leaders need to take responsibility for establishing norms that help managers feel more secure. They can create a climate marked by psychological safety and positive norms (e.g., learning from, rather than punishing, mistakes) and thereby increase the tendency for managers who feel incompetent to solicit ideas.