A Study of the Nature of the Deaf Effect Response to Bad News Reporting

While escalation of commitment is well known in the IS literature, a recent body of literature has arisen focusing on organizational communication as a cause of escalation. Most of this literature has focused on the failure of organization members to communicate bad news about project status. In this dissertation, I focus on the “deaf effect,” the failure of managers to hear, respond to or accept reports of project problems and change a failing course of action. I examine the small amount of extant literature on this phenomenon, construct an individual level conceptual model of how this effect might occur and then test that model in three studies: a laboratory experiment in which tests the basic framework of the model; a multi-cultural experiment in which we add cultural variables to the model; and a case-study in which we examine how project status is manipulated in the process of communication.