Breaking Silence and Improving Performance: How Subordinates Feeling Trusted, and Loyalty towards Supervisors Mediates the Relationship between Ethical Leadership and Project Team Members Silence

Communication is considered a crucial phenomenon for the project success, but due to the silent behaviour of team members, it becomes challenging to complete the project according to the plan, and delay in it eventually leads to the failure of the project. Silence further leads to severe health consequences, including stress, emotional instability, and trust issues. Therefore, the management needs to pay special attention to this issue and resolve it by motivating team members to break up the silence and share their concerns. This study aims to examine the impact of ethical leadership in dealing with the silent behaviour of project team members through the mediating role of subordinate feeling trusted and loyalty towards their supervisor. Data were collected from 334 team members involved in the construction projects. Consistent with the literature, results confirm that ethical leadership reduces the silence of project team members (Acquiescent; Defensive; Prosocial). The findings also elaborate that the relationship between ethical leadership and project team members’ silence (Acquiescent; Defensive; Prosocial) is partially mediated by the subordinates feeling trusted and loyalty towards supervisor. These results suggest that project managers should adopt an ethical leadership style to prevent the silent behaviour of project team members, which will support the successful execution of projects.