The principal aim of this research is to develop a greater understanding of how and why employees remain silent in the context of the effort-reward exchange relationship between employers and employees. This thesis fills the gap in the knowledge about employee silence from a broader and deeper labour process understanding. The labour process perspective acknowledges there could be a genuine conflict of interest within the effort-reward exchange relationship between employees and managers (Edwards, 1986; Donaghey et al, 2011; Nechanska et al, 2020). Hence, the thesis offers a unique perspective that employees may remain silent to advance (and/or defend) their own interests while managers may structure silence over a range of issues to advance their interests. The research identifies and examines the workplace context of employee silence, and conceptualises the various forms of employee silence processes and outcomes with references to the Frontier of Control (Goodrich, 1920; Donaghey et al, 2011; Nechanska et al, 2020). A qualitative research design was undertaken in the form of semi-structured interviews with employees in the Republic of Ireland from across section of companies in both size and sectors. The data collected represents many variations of workplace contexts with regards to unionisation, management structures, nature of work, and social relations among actors of the employment relationship. The main theoretical contribution of this thesis is the development of a sensitising framework for employee silence within the employment relationship. The findings of this thesis contribute to an explanation of how workplace context influence employees decisions to remain silent or prevent them from having a say over various topics in their workplace. The analysis subsequently identified and conceptualised six distinct form of silent processes and three distinct outcomes of employee silence. In addition, the thesis identified links between various contexts, processes and outcomes of silence. As a result, this thesis contributes to a greater appreciation of how silence functions within the employment relationship (Nechanska et al, 2020, Donaghey et al, 2011, Barry and Wilkinson, 2015).