Obstacles to Upward Communication:

• Many employees fear that expressing their true feelings about the company to their boss could be dangerous.
• The fairly wide-spread belief that disagreeing with the boss will block promotion still holds.
• There is a wide-spread conviction that management is not interested in employee problems.
• Some have the feeling that employees are not rewarded for good ideas.
• There is a lack of supervisory accessibility and responsiveness.
• The conviction is widespread that higher management doesn’t take prompt action on problems.

Bits and Pieces, May 1990, p. 9