A city-based cross-cultural psychologist will be the Indian collaborator for a 54-country study, led by Germany’s Wilhelm-Wundt-Institut für Psychologie, Universität Leipzig, which will examine the culture of “organisational silence” or the constrained environment in organisations that hinder free and frank exchange of ideas.
Arun Tipandjan, secretary of the Pondicherry Psychology Association, will be working with specialists from different countries for the international project, led by Michael Knoll, professor of organisational psychology, chair of work and organisational psychology, Wilhelm-Wundt-Institut für Psychologie, Universität Leipzig.
“As a co-researcher, my role will be to contribute towards an understanding of the organisational silence phenomenon in the Indian context, something not explored before to such a scale. The results from this region will also be submitted to the pool of findings from across the world,” he said.
Marking a first
Significantly, the three-year project, which is likely to be funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), could be the first multicultural and multi-city study to illustrate the extent to which voices are stifled at workplaces going into a post-pandemic world, where employees are likely to baulk at speaking up, out of fear of punitive action, or worse, of losing their jobs.
“A meta-analysis of our findings, matched against the results of pre-pandemic inquiries on this subject, could be an important spin-off from new research to see how and to what degree the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to large scale lay-offs and pay rollback, has aggravated the culture of silence at workplaces,” Dr. Tipandjan said.
Some studies have indicated that in societies with high unemployment rates, the level of organisational silence will also be high. “We will be able to see how the pandemic has affected what we call the ‘power distance’ in the organisational hierarchy,” said the specialist, who was invited to participate in the international initiative by Dr. Knoll.
Incidentally, Leipzig has the distinction of being home to the world’s first psychology laboratory, set-up by Wilhelm Wundt, father of modern psychology and a pioneer in cultural psychology. The lab was destroyed in the bombing by allied forces in 1943. Dr. Knoll has led a previous investigation into how employee silence, the withholding of work-related ideas, questions or concerns from someone who could effect a change, hamper individual and collective learning as well as the detection of errors and unethical behaviour, in many areas of the world.
The study, ‘International Differences in Employee Silence Motives: Scale Validation, Prevalence, and Relationships with Culture Characteristics across 33 Countries’ in the Journal of Organizational Behavior (March, 2021), found relationships between silence motives and power distance, institutional collectivism, and uncertainty avoidance. Overall, the findings suggested that relationships between silence and cultural dimensions are more complex than commonly assumed.
The India-specific initiative will involve longitudinal surveys, qualitative assessments, administering questionnaires, vignette (scenario-based) studies, and focus group discussions. It is proposed to involve corporate and government settings and universities. The project is expected to roll-out by May, said Dr. Tipandjan, who is perhaps the first and only DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholar in the city in 2007.
During the period when he was completing his Ph.D in cognitive psychology and research methodology from Chemnitz University of Germany, the psychologist initiated a considerable amount of Indo-German collaborative research in psychology and was presented with the German Government’s outstanding foreign student award in 2010.
A widely published author in high-impact journals, Dr. Tipandjan has also collaborated with Cambridge University and Angela Ruskin University, U.K. and the Nanterre University, Paris.
One of his research initiatives has been on the Francophone version of the personality assessment questionnaire, which was administered to the French-speaking diaspora in Puducherry along with other former French colonies.
He was also the Indian collaborator for the DGF-aided “Value of Children” project that sought to understand the concept of progeny in different cultures.
“In contrast to Western societies with State-sponsored social security systems for the elderly, and where scions move away from families once they turn independent, children in the Indian context, especially boys, are desired by parents primarily for reasons such as fulfilling the socio-cultural mandate of lighting the funeral pyre, carrying on the family lineage and even regarded almost as an investment for the future”, he said.
These findings were discussed in “Son Preference in India: Shedding Light on the North-South Gradient”(Comparative Population Studies/2014).
Outside academia, Dr. Tipandjan serves as student wellness coordinator for IGMCRI and, as founder of International Centre for Psychological Counselling and Social Research, was called upon by the health department to offer free tele-counselling for anxiety or panic and stressed out police during the COVID-19 pandemic.