In recent years, employees have raised concerns about their organizations’ practices and policies related to their companies’ societal impacts, political standings, or moral positions. Organizational leaders must navigate these employee concerns even as many of them threaten growth initiatives, such as new government contracts or expansion into new markets. Yet there is little research that considers how employee discussions of polarizing social issues may shape their experiences of psychological safety inside of organizations and what the implications of these experiences may be. In this paper, I explore how some employees may experience disillusionment as they raise social issues in organizations where leaders cultivate psychologically safe climates. These employees may expect leaders to welcome their input around social issues in the same way that leaders welcome task-related ideas; when employees instead encounter barriers to raising these concerns, they may turn to more contentious forms of employee activism to escalate their complaints. This paper explores how employee experiences of psychological safety may be bounded by the topics employees raise, and how these boundaries may carry spillover effects for organizational leaders.
