Rules of engagement, credibility and the political economy of organizational dissent

This article studies how organizations can choose dissent regimes that encourage organization members to express dissent in ways that provide the organization with informational benefits while minimizing the hazards associated with opportunistic behavior by members in the dissent process. Using a game-theoretic model, we demonstrate how logic-based and balanced rules of engagement can change various members' cost—benefit calculus in deciding whether to express dissent and thereby enable an organization to better balance the trade-off between capturing the benefits from constructive dissent and avoiding the hazards of destructive dissent.We then analyze how credibility problems faced by the leader may prevent organizations from adopting and implementing dissent regimes with such rules of engagement. We identify conditions under which an increase in the leader's reputational loss from opportunistic suppression of dissent can actually reduce the incidence of the adoption of dissent regime with rules of engagement, as well as the organization's profit. Finally, we explore implications of our analysis for the study of the role of informal leaders in organizational dissent, and for the relationship between dissent and organizational change processes.