Digitally mediated work increasingly makes employee behavior, communication, participation, and evaluation observable, recordable, searchable, and potentially reusable across audiences. Yet greater visibility does not necessarily imply greater candor. Employees may anticipate that digitally persistent expression can influence reputation, managerial evaluation, future opportunity, status, or access to resources, particularly when audiences are uncertain and evaluative criteria are opaque. This Original Conceptual Theory Article develops a proposed Theory of Datafied Silence to explain how persistent visibility may coexist with strategically filtered organizational expression. The theory integrates employee voice and silence research with scholarship on behavioral visibility, electronic monitoring, algorithmic control, digital reputation, context collapse, impression management, and platform affordances. It proposes visibility–candor decoupling as a central organizing principle: technically observable workplaces may generate visible records that are less representative of employees’ privately held concerns because workers selectively withhold, narrow, sanitize, delay, reroute, or restrict audiences for work-relevant expression. These processes are proposed to depend on anticipated reputational exposure and to vary with psychological safety, perceived impact, hierarchy, managerial receptivity, platform affordances, evaluation opacity, identity-linked expectations, and contestability. The theory does not assume that digital visibility universally suppresses voice or that silence necessarily reflects fear. Instead, it specifies rival explanations, multilevel boundaries, and conditions under which the proposed mechanisms should be tested. The contribution is an explicitly unvalidated conceptual account linking datafication to strategic silence while separating technical observability from organizational influence and conceptual plausibility from demonstrated organizational effects.
