Organizations often need to deal with ambiguous threats, which are complex, unprecedented, and difficult-to-predict events that hold the potential to cause harm. Drawing on the attention-based view of work behavior, we propose that employees do not always remain vigilant to such threats. Consequently, we argue that, in the face of those threats, employees can fail to notice or recognize problems or vulnerabilities in their organizations' work processes or products that can hinder coping. We posit that this effect is, paradoxically, more pronounced when employees are working with trustworthy managers who are perceived as capable and focused enough on the well-being of their units to adequately deal with work challenges. Thereby, we highlight that employees may overlook problems and thus not speak up, precisely when their input is highly desired to address ambiguous threats and can be effectively used by competent and caring managers. Using a combination of field surveys and preregistered experiments, we demonstrate support for our arguments. In the process, we present an alternative attention-based perspective to the voice literature that has so far predominantly focused on cost-benefit-based explanations (i.e., how employees evaluate the perceived costs of speaking up vs. presumed benefits) when describing hurdles to employee voice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

---

未被注意到的问题和被忽视的机会：员工在模棱两可的威胁下如何以及何时无法发声。


组织通常需要处理模棱两可的威胁，这些威胁是复杂、前所未有的、难以预测的事件，有可能造成伤害。借鉴基于注意力的工作行为观点，我们建议员工不要总是对此类威胁保持警惕。因此，我们认为，面对这些威胁，员工可能无法注意到或识别其组织工作流程或产品中可能阻碍应对的问题或漏洞。我们假设，自相矛盾的是，当员工与值得信赖的经理一起工作时，这种影响会更加明显，这些经理被认为有能力并足够关注其部门的福祉，以充分应对工作挑战。因此，我们强调，员工可能会忽视问题，因此不会说出来，而这恰恰是当他们的意见被强烈希望解决模棱两可的威胁，并且可以被有能力和有爱心的经理有效地利用时。通过结合实地调查和预先注册的实验，我们证明了对我们论点的支持。在此过程中，我们提出了另一种基于注意力的视角来替代语音文献，迄今为止，该文献主要集中在基于成本效益的解释（即员工如何评估发声的感知成本与假定的好处）在描述员工声音的障碍时。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 （c） 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。