There is a particular kind of silence that can tell you a lot about a workplace.

A manager asks, “Does anyone have a concern with this?” Nobody says anything. The meeting ends. People walk out. And five minutes later, the conversation begins in the corridor.

Someone points out that the decision will create a problem. Another says, “I knew this would happen.” Someone else quietly responds, “Why didn’t you say that in the meeting?” The answer is often not that people had nothing to say. They simply knew better than to say it.

Fear at work rarely looks like someone openly threatening employees anymore. In most modern workplaces, it is much more subtle. It can live in a manager’s reaction to bad news, the tone used when someone makes a mistake, the way disagreement is received, or the consequences faced by the person who asks an uncomfortable question.

And sometimes, nobody needs to explicitly say, “Don’t challenge me.” People learn it anyway.

Fear Doesn’t Always Look Like Fear

When we talk about fear-based workplaces, we often imagine extreme environments: an angry boss shouting across the office, public humiliation, threats of termination, or unreasonable punishment.

Those things certainly exist. But fear can be much quieter. It can be the employee who carefully rehearses an email before sending it because they are worried about how the manager might interpret it. It can be the team member who notices a mistake in a senior leader’s presentation but decides not to point it out. It can be the employee who has a better idea but thinks, “There’s no point. They’ve already decided.”

It can even be the manager who says, “My door is always open,” while everyone knows that walking through that door with bad news is likely to end badly. This is one of the more interesting things about workplace culture. People don’t necessarily respond to what leaders say. They respond to what they have learned from previous interactions.

If speaking up once resulted in being dismissed, people remember. If admitting a mistake resulted in being humiliated, people remember. If challenging an established way of doing things resulted in being labelled “difficult”, people remember. And eventually, they stop taking the risk.

The Price of Staying Quiet

This matters because organizations need people to speak up.

A customer-facing employee may notice that customers are repeatedly complaining about the same problem. An accountant may spot an unusual transaction. A junior engineer may notice a flaw in a design. A nurse may notice something that could affect patient safety. A salesperson may realize that a product is not solving the problem customers actually have.

The information often exists somewhere inside the organization. The question is whether people feel safe enough to bring it forward. Research on psychological safety has been particularly useful in helping us understand this. Amy Edmondson’s foundational study of 51 work teams found that psychological safety – the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking – was associated with learning behavior, which in turn was associated with team performance.

More recent research has continued to show why silence matters. A 2024 study published in Human Relations found that remaining silent about operational concerns can have detrimental effects on employees’ job performance and creativity.

In other words, when people are afraid to speak, the organization doesn’t simply lose a few opinions. It loses information. And information is often where improvement begins.

When Bad News Stops Travelling Upward

One of the most dangerous consequences of fear is that it changes the information leaders receive.

Imagine a CEO who reacts badly whenever someone brings disappointing news. The first employee reports a problem and gets questioned aggressively: “How did you allow this to happen?” The second employee sees what happened and becomes more cautious. The third employee decides to present the situation with the problem softened. Eventually, bad news starts travelling upward in a different form. By the time it reaches senior leadership, the problem may look smaller than it really is.

This creates an interesting paradox. A leader who believes they are maintaining high standards through fear may actually be making themselves less informed. They think they are in control because nobody is challenging them. But silence is not necessarily agreement. Sometimes, silence is simply self-protection.

Research on employee silence has described this very phenomenon: people may withhold important information because they fear negative personal or professional consequences. The leader may therefore have a very comfortable meeting. But they may be making decisions with a very incomplete picture.

Fear Is Particularly Expensive When You Need Innovation

There is another reason fear becomes problematic in modern workplaces.

Innovation requires people to be wrong occasionally. A new idea may not work. A prototype may fail. A proposal may sound ridiculous before it becomes useful. A junior employee may ask a question that initially seems naive but exposes something everyone else had overlooked.

If people believe that mistakes will damage their reputation, they naturally become more conservative. Why suggest something unusual when the safe option is available? Why challenge an established process when you can simply follow it? Why volunteer for an experiment when failure might be remembered longer than success?

This is one reason psychological safety has become so closely associated with learning and creativity. Research in software teams, for example, has found positive relationships between psychological safety, team reflexivity and performance.

Pixar offers an interesting real-world contrast. In discussing collective creativity, Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull has emphasized the difficulty of managing the risks inherent in creative work. Pixar’s approach was built around the idea that good ideas emerge through an iterative process rather than appearing perfectly formed at the beginning.

That kind of environment requires people to be able to say, “This isn’t working,” without feeling that admitting it makes them the problem.

High Standards Are Not the Same as Fear

This is where the conversation becomes more nuanced.

A psychologically safe workplace is not one where everyone is comfortable all the time. People should still be challenged. Poor performance should still be addressed. Deadlines should still matter. Difficult conversations are still necessary.

The distinction is in how people experience the consequences of speaking, questioning and making mistakes. A leader can say, “This quality is not acceptable. Let’s understand what went wrong and fix it.” Another can say, “How many times do I have to tell you? Why can’t you people get anything right?” Both leaders are communicating that standards matter. But they are creating very different environments.

The first creates accountability without making the person afraid to engage with the problem. The second may teach employees that the safest strategy is to hide the problem.

This is why psychological safety should never be confused with psychological comfort. As Amy Edmondson’s work makes clear, psychological safety is about being able to take interpersonal risks while still having high standards and accountability. A good workplace does not remove discomfort. It makes productive discomfort possible.

The Fear We Create Without Realizing It

Perhaps the most difficult part is that leaders don’t always intend to create fear.

A manager may believe they are simply being decisive. A senior executive may think they are demanding accountability. A founder may feel that being deeply involved is necessary because they care about quality. But employees experience leadership through repeated interactions, not intentions.

A raised eyebrow when someone challenges an idea. A sarcastic response to a question. Interrupting someone before they finish. Asking for honesty and then becoming defensive when honesty arrives. None of these incidents may seem significant on their own. But culture is rarely created by one dramatic event. It is created through patterns. After enough repetitions, people start predicting the reaction. And once people can predict that speaking up will come with a cost, they don’t need to be told to stay quiet. They simply do.

What Leaders Can Do Differently

The solution is not to become endlessly agreeable or to turn every meeting into a democratic discussion.

It begins with making it safe to tell the truth. When someone brings bad news, the first response matters. Instead of immediately asking, “Who is responsible?”, try asking, “What happened?” and “What are we missing?” When someone disagrees, resist the temptation to win the argument immediately. Sometimes the most useful response is simply, “Tell me more.” And when someone admits a mistake, separate the mistake from the person. Hold them accountable for fixing it, but also use the incident to understand what the system, process or team can learn from it.

Most importantly, leaders need to pay attention to who speaks and who has stopped speaking. If the same two people contribute in every meeting while everyone else remains silent, don’t automatically assume the others have nothing to say. They may have learned that saying something isn’t worth the risk.

The Question Leaders Should Be Asking

A useful test of workplace culture is not whether employees can speak.

It is whether they believe they can speak without unnecessarily putting themselves at risk. That distinction matters. Because fear can produce compliance. It can even produce short-term performance. People may meet deadlines because they are afraid of what happens if they don’t. They may follow instructions because questioning them feels dangerous.

But compliance is not the same as commitment and silence is not the same as alignment. If people are afraid to tell you what you don’t want to hear, eventually you will hear only what you want to hear. That is when fear becomes expensive.

The strongest leaders are not necessarily the ones whose teams are most afraid of disappointing them. They are the ones whose teams are willing to walk into the room and say,“I think we’re getting this wrong.” Because sometimes, the most valuable thing an employee can give a leader is not agreement. It is the courage to tell them something they would rather not hear.