Oftentimes, leaders opt out of responding to emails, text messages, and questions from direct reports or others in their organizations, thus making a conscious decision to leave questions unanswered.
I actually asked some top leaders why they sometimes choose not to respond to certain questions or people. Answers ranged from not knowing how to best respond, to not wanting to give disappointing responses when they know the answer may not be well received.
It is certainly understandable that leaders may not want to provide responses that may hurt feelings, especially in this age of litigations. However, not responding at all may trigger employees to formulate their own reasons for non-response – and this may be worse. According to Williams (2022), individuals will likely be ok with less desirable responses if they believe it is coming from a fair and honest place. Williams discussed a concept called procedural justice, which is the fairness of the process leaders use to make decisions about employees. If employees believe the process used to make decisions about them is fair, they also tend to still support and trust the leader(s) who made the decisions.
This suggests that instead of not responding to questions asked by employees, leaders will prove more trustworthy if they treat all employees well by making sure the processes they use to make decisions are perceived as fair, and that outcomes and rewards are equitably distributed. With this in mind, even when responses are less than optimum, leaders and employees can feel assured that the processes used to make decisions are fair and well developed.
The more you know…
Lam, L., Peng, K., Wong, C.-S., & Lau, D. (2017, September). Is more feedback seeking always better? Leader-member exchange moderates the relationship between feedback-seeking behavior and performance. Journal of Management, 43(7), 2005-2403.
Waddoups, N. (2022, September). Feedback-driven time segmenting: The effect of feedback frequency on employee behavior. Contemporary Accounting Research , 39(3), 1509-2233.
Williams, C. (2022). Management (12 ed.). Boston: Cengage.
