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Leaders tend to talk about culture in abstract terms: values, norms, trust, belonging, and the like. But employees watch for the moments that show how culture actually manifests. During meetings, who gets interrupted? Employees notice whose sentences are cut short, redirected, or quietly overtaken — and whose ideas are allowed full expression.
Interruptions are rarely considered in culture surveys or engagement dashboards; they’re often instead dismissed as the outcome of a particular conversational style or personality clash, or the by-product of fast-paced work. Yet interruptions are one of the clearest cues employees use to assess whose voices carry authority, whose judgment is trusted, and whose presence requires constant negotiation.
In our research on workplace microaggressions that was recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics, we found that subtle acts of exclusion can erode employees’ sense of psychological ownership and shape how they respond to the organization. Across two vignette experiments and a two-wave survey, a pattern became clear: Small acts of exclusion had real behavioral consequences.
How do those dynamics play out in everyday interaction? To answer this question, we ran a focused substudy of in-depth interviews with leaders who had experienced interruption at work and observed it among others. We also analyzed meeting recordings and field observations, using an interactional lens to code turn-taking, interruption, and idea uptake.
Across both strands of the research, we found that employees didn’t talk about culture in the abstract language leaders used but in terms of moments — and that moments of interruption were among the most revealing. Culture is evident in how interaction unfolds moment by moment, especially when the stakes are high and attention is scarce. People judge organizations less by what leaders claim than by whether people’s everyday experience signals responsiveness, dignity, and care.
Interruptions as Cultural Indicators
Interruptions are not inherently problematic. In some contexts, they can signal energy, urgency, or collaboration. What matters is how leaders handle them. Who interrupts, who gets interrupted, and what happens next? When someone is interrupted, three things happen at once: Their contribution is cut short; the direction of discussion shifts; and a judgment is made, implicitly, about whose input merits completion.
Across the settings we examined, interruptions were spread unevenly. Participants described them clustering around particular people, viewpoints, and moments, especially when the speaker was still forming a point or introducing a dissenting view. One leader told us, “It wasn’t that anyone was openly dismissive. It was that my ideas rarely got to finish breathing.”
Over time, those patterns shaped participation. Many people we interviewed described adapting their speech and behavior after repeated interruptions, by shortening their contributions, adding disclaimers, or waiting for an explicit invitation to speak. It’s through these repeated micro-adjustments and moments of self-correction, not through policy, that culture becomes internalized. This adaptation effect was one of the most consistent findings in our follow-on study.
Because interruptions are common and often ambiguous, leaders tend to minimize them, attributing them to communication style, time pressure, or poor meeting etiquette. But for those on the receiving end, repeated interruption is rarely experienced as neutral. Employees quickly learn who is likely to be cut off, when, and by whom. That predictability turns interruptions into cultural signals that reveal whose authority is fragile and whose is buffered by status.
In organizations that publicly emphasized inclusion and psychological safety, such moments were especially consequential. Employees often contrasted stated values with what interruptions revealed in practice. As one participant put it, “You don’t need a policy to tell you where the power is. You hear it in who gets cut off.”
We found that interruptions often served as an early indicator employees used to decide whether broader cultural commitments, such as openness, candor, or collaboration, were genuine. In several settings, participants referred to interruption patterns as “the real culture” regardless of what leaders espoused.
The Myth Of ‘Jumping Back In’
Executives often assume that interruptions are harmless because anyone can simply reenter the conversation. In practice, that assumption ignores how power shapes participation. Speaking again after an interruption requires confidence that one’s contribution will be welcomed rather than penalized. That confidence is not equally distributed. In our data, some participants were far more likely to reclaim the floor after being interrupted than others, who were more likely to withdraw, wait, or defer entirely.
In one tech firm that prized robust debate, leaders interpreted interruptions as signs of energy, but employees experienced them differently. Interruptions clustered around dissenting views and were rarely moderated. One employee told us, “It wasn’t that disagreement wasn’t allowed. It was that disagreement had to sound a certain way, from a certain person.”
What leaders described as dynamism, employees experienced as constraint. This gap between leadership interpretation and employee experience was one of the most persistent disconnects in the study.
One reason interruptions persist is that leaders rarely experience them symmetrically. Status secures attention: More senior people are interrupted less, deferred to more, and insulated from conversational risk. As a result, meetings can feel open and participatory from the top while feeling constrained from below.
In our interviews, several executives were surprised when presented with interactional findings. Many believed that they had been modeling inclusive behavior, but culture is not transmitted through intention. When shown the pattern of interruptions, they saw the gap between intention and impact. One executive said, “I thought I was helping by keeping things moving. I didn’t see who was paying for the pace.”
We also found that the same interruption does not land the same way for everyone. Seniority, role, identity, and organizational standing all shape how these moments are experienced and interpreted. Across our interviews and observations, employees described interruptions as especially consequential when they came before a point had fully formed, or when they redirected discussion away from uncertainty, risk, or challenges. In those moments, interruption did more than cut someone off. It filtered what counted as usable knowledge in the room.
This matters not only because it is unfair but also because it is costly. Across our observational data, interruptions often truncated contributions that raised concerns about risk, ethical issues, or longer-term implications. In other words, the voices most likely to be cut off were the ones broadening the conversation in useful ways. Diverse representation alone does not address this. It may widen the bench of voices in the room, but interaction determines which voices prevail.
How to Address Interruptions
Once leaders recognize interruptions as cultural signals, their instinct is often to correct the interrupter directly. But calling out interrupt
