Want Workers To Speak Up? Tell Them What The Team Stands To Lose

Most people who have held down a typical 9-to-5 job know the feeling. Something is clearly going wrong at the office, but speaking up feels like stepping into a minefield. Maybe the boss won’t take it well, or certain coworkers will see such an action as disloyal or disruptive. Perhaps it’s just easier to keep quiet and hope someone else says something. A new study across multiple experiments and real workplaces has found a surprisingly simple way to get employees past that fear, and it comes down to how a problem is framed.

When employees think about a workplace problem in terms of what everyone stands to lose if nothing changes, rather than what they might personally gain from a fix, they become far more willing to speak up. The finding adds a new twist to a common assumption in workplace research: that fear of personal consequences is the main force keeping people silent. Imagining shared losses appears to shift how people weigh those risks.

Published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the research was conducted by Jeffrey P. Thomas and Jonathan E. Booth of the London School of Economics, alongside colleagues from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the University of Oklahoma. Across three studies in health care, consulting, and auditing firms, the team found a consistent pattern. Framing problems as potential losses, especially losses affecting an entire team or department, produced the strongest effect observed in these studies for getting people to speak up.

Why Losses Beat Gains in the Brain

Researchers built on a well-known idea from behavioral economics called prospect theory, originally developed by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The core insight is straightforward: people hate losing things more than they enjoy gaining things of equal value. A $100 loss stings more than a $100 windfall feels good. This built-in tendency means people are often more willing to take risks when trying to avoid losses than when chasing gains.

Applied to the workplace, the logic is that speaking up about a problem is inherently risky. An employee could be labeled a troublemaker, lose access to resources, or face retaliation. But if that employee is focused on what the organization or team stands to lose by staying silent, whether that’s revenue, competitive standing, or day-to-day operations, the mental math shifts. The potential shared loss starts to feel heavier than the personal risk of raising a concern.

That’s exactly what the researchers set out to test. In the first study, 1,531 working adults recruited online wrote about a real workplace problem, then were randomly assigned to write about either the losses that could result if it went unfixed or the gains from resolving it. People focused on potential losses reported significantly greater willingness to speak up to a supervisor.

Does It Matter Whether the Stakes Are Personal or Shared?

Study 2 pushed the idea further. Researchers recruited 516 MBA students who all worked at least 30 hours per week. Each read a scenario about a manager named “Alex,” a deliberately gender-neutral name, who had received performance feedback at a fictional company.

Participants were placed into one of four conditions: a personal cash bonus gain or loss for themselves alone, or a cash bonus gain or loss for everyone in their department. People told that the entire department stood to lose money if the problem went unaddressed reported the highest willingness to speak up, far exceeding any other group. Whether the comparison was to personal gains, personal losses, or even collective gains, nothing matched the motivating power of framing a problem as a shared loss.

Real Workplaces Tell the Same Story

Experiments are useful for establishing cause and effect, but researchers also wanted to see if the pattern held in actual organizations. Data came from a health care firm, a consulting firm, and an auditing firm, all U.S.-based, yielding matched data from 127, 275, and 359 employee-supervisor pairs. Employees whose supervisors framed problems in terms of potential losses were rated by those same supervisors as speaking up more often. Gain framing showed weaker, inconsistent results across all three samples.

That last point is worth pausing on. Many leadership approaches emphasize positivity, encouraging managers to frame challenges as opportunities. This research suggests that when the goal is getting employees to flag problems and raise concerns, that upbeat framing may actually fall flat.

What This Means for Managers Who Want Workers to Speak Up

Leaders who want their teams to flag problems and raise concerns may get better results by shifting how they talk about workplace issues. Instead of “if we fix this, we could boost sales,” a more effective approach might be: “if we don’t address this, the whole department could lose its competitive edge.”

This isn’t about negativity or manufactured alarm. It’s about tapping into a deeply wired human tendency to fight harder against losses than to chase equivalent gains, while making clear the stakes extend beyond the individual.

Any manager can change how they frame a problem in a single conversation, which makes this one of the more immediately practical takeaways from a field that often points to fixed factors like personality or organizational culture. In workplaces where silence can lead to anything from missed efficiencies to outright disasters, that’s a shift worth making.

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