Exploring Collective and Multi-Audience Dissent in Organizational Meetings

Abstract

Organizations without healthy dissent stagnate from myopic thinking. Previous research has examined how employees might dissent to supervisors or coworkers, but little research has focused on how dissent might be expressed to multiple audiences simultaneously. Dissent conversations might happen only once or might be repeated over time, but the ways in which dissent processes unfold over time has also been neglected in past research. The present study examined biweekly meetings in the fundraising department of a nonprofit organization for 2 years to explore organizational dissent across time and to reveal possible nuances in the ways in which dissenters express disagreement. Results revealed several dissent topics repeated during the data collection period with mixed results—some of these topics were resolved whereas others were not. Two dissent conversations emerged as particularly meaningful events in the history of the department. At the same time, these data illustrated dissent expressed to multiple audiences (a single dissenter simultaneously talking to a supervisor and multiple coworkers) and dissent expressed by multiple dissenters. These forms of collective dissent extend previous models of organizational dissent that typically conceptualize a conversation between a single dissenter and a single dissent audience.