Advancing Employee Voice Through Insights From Democratic Innovations

Sustainable Human Resource Management (HRM), has the potential to facilitate organisations development of principles, policies and practices for the challenges of the 21st century. However, to do this we argue a fundamental element in this process has yet to be fully addressed and incorporated into the theory and practice of sustainable HRM; this is employee voice. Additionally, the actual and potential role of trade unions in facilitating employee voice is yet to be conceptualised within sustainable HRM literature. We argue that the development of effective employee voice mechanisms is vital in the implementation and maintenance of sustainable HRM. In this conceptual paper, we outline the nature of the voice architecture, the impact of the employment relationship on voice mechanisms, how it can be effectively measured, and propose a framework for further exploring these concepts. These key factors we identify as critical in implementing and assessing the effectiveness of the relationship between employee voice and sustainable HRM, to potentially serve as a basis of future research into sustainable HRM.

Contrary to negative reactions like counterproductive work behavior, employee voice(EV)is employees' autonomous and active vocal behavior, which can provide opportunities for the solution to a variety of problems for both sides of employees and organizations, thereby bringing multi-effects and thus being of great research value. However, though various and numerous, extant EV research is fragmented, narrowed and sometimes conclusion-divergent, and on the whole in a status of segregation and lack of communication and integration due to perspective differences. Based on EV's evolution context and the concepts like zone of acceptance, this paper inquires the nature and general intension of EV, highlights the significance of voice to employees, and raises the concept of peripheral zone of acceptance. This paper reviews and inspects EV research focusing on EV effects from the perspectives of pluralist industrial relation view and unary human resource management theory, and constructs an integrated framework of EV research and two-dimensional continuum of EV's presentation form, to form more comprehensive and deep understanding of EV and have implications for future research and practice.

Employee voice has been studied across a diverse range of disciplines, generating an extensive body of literature on the topic. However, its conceptualization across the disciplines has differed, resulting in a lack of integrative theories and frameworks on employee voice. The main objective of this paper is to conduct a multi-disciplinary review of the academic research on employee voice, to show where there is an opportunity to adopt and adapt the findings and research on employee voice within alternate disciplines, and to demonstrate how this may lead to a common conceptualization of employee voice. This review focuses on an analysis of the Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior disciplines’ conceptualization of employee voice, beginning with the identification of where the two disciplines diverged in their concept and study of employee voice. Further, it maps their commonalities and differences, on the basis of motive, content, mechanism, target and management of voice. Finally, it identifies opportunities to incorporate the alternate disciplinary perspective and proposes a conceptual model that acknowledges both formal and informal voice. It is proposed that the consideration of formal and informal employee voice in future studies will enable the integration of voice research within the Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior disciplines, which in turn will assist in the development of a holistic framework on employee voice.

Employee voice has witnessed a consistent growth in conceptual as well as empirical research across a range of disciplines. Several reviews have been conducted on employee voice due to diverse and extensive literature available; however, no systematic literature review is available on the antecedents, outcomes, inhibitors, organizational norms and practices in employee voice research. This study, therefore, presents a systematic review of 67 research articles on employee voice published in 33 journals from 2000 to 2021. The articles were collected from seven well-known management databases namely, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, SAGE, Taylor and Francis, Emerald Insight, Wiley and JSTOR. The primary aim of this review is to identify themes of research on employee voice and to assess the methodologies used in the literature. Five themes were used to organize the findings of the research on employee voice. Subsequently, the review also sought to determine the type of research methods employed in the studies of employee voice concentrating on research design, statistical methodology and sectoral focus. On the basis of review findings, the study also discusses practical implications and provides future research directions.

Servant leadership has been identified as extremely important for organizational performance and success; therefore, much focus is placed on developing and maintaining leaders’ positive attitudes and behaviors toward their subordinates. Different servant models have been put out by earlier scholars. Nevertheless, only a small number of studies have focused on employee voice as a key precursor to servant leadership. The goal of this study is to look at the impacts of servant leadership style on employee voice by focusing on the mediating role of trust in a leader. Time-lagged data were gathered from 336 employees of small- and medium-sized enterprises in Pakistan. The perceived servant leadership style was positively and significantly associated with employees’voices mediated by trust in leaders. This study upgrades the comprehension of the components underlying the servant leadership and employee voice model by recognizing the intervening role of trust in the leader. Nonetheless, the survey design was not longitudinal, which restricts the study’s capacity to affirm causality. The results of this study acknowledge that servant leadership style and trust in leaders can promote constructive employee voice behavior. This study addresses the unproven mediating procedure of the link between servant leadership style and employee voice and offers new bearings for servant leadership and employee voice research, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been explored before.

PurposeCovid-19 pandemic is perceived as one of the great disasters in history. It forced countries to impose travel restrictions and lockdowns, and it negatively influenced hotels’ performance. Therefore, this article aims to provide explanations of how hotels can survive, recover and succeed in the post-pandemic period. This article focuses on the role of employee voice, knowledge sharing, and employee innovation in promoting service recovery performance.Design/methodology/approachThis is a conceptual paper that focuses on discussing the relationships between employee voice, knowledge sharing, employee innovation, and service recovery performance.FindingsThe study suggests that employee voice is a vital element that can enhance knowledge sharing at hotels. Furthermore, knowledge sharing is proposed to encourage employees to engage in innovative behavior, which, in turn, can promote service recovery performance.Originality/valueThe study provides a framework that explains a mechanism of how hotels can accelerate recovery efforts from Covid-19 repercussions by shedding light on the important role of employee voice, knowledge sharing, and employee innovation.

Employee voice viewed through a cross-cultural lens

This study contributes to research on voice behavior by identifying the social context that can create positive effects of voice behaviors in the side of employees. Voice to employees can have a significant impact on continuous job engagement depending on the results of communication with the leader. Although the voice research so far presupposes the positive effect of employee voice, in fact, little attention has been paid to when voice can lead to a positive result for employees. The current research attempts to fill this research gap by exploring a social boundary condition between employee voice and job engagement. This study examines that voice can lead to constructive results when leaders try to understand the viewpoints or thoughts contained in employee voice. At the same time, this study also suggests that employees who try to speak up can also get positive results when they try to understand the thoughts or viewpoints contained in the leader's voice feedback. This study proposes that the leader’s perspective taking on employee voice and employees’ perspective taking on the leader’s voice feedback serves as a social contextual contingency for the desirable effect of employee voice on job engagement, respectively. Using the data from a sample of 162 employees of a financial service company in South Korea, I found that only when employees perceived high levels of perspective taking of the leader on their voice, employee voice was significantly and positively related to job engagement. This finding highlights the important moderating role the leader’s perspective taking plays in the process where voice leads to job engagement at work. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Prior research on voice has identified important managerial traits and behaviors, such as openness and solicitation, and voice climate conditions that influence frequency of employee voice. This collection of symposium papers helps deepen our understanding of how managers and the team context influence the voice process by adding new team and manager-related antecedents into the equation, such as group norms, participative leadership, leader personal control, leader framing of voice significance, and leader rejection tactics. In addition, several of these papers add complexity to our scholarly thinking around voice by exploring how these manager-related variables interact with other contextual variables to more precisely describe effects on voice behavior. Lastly, by examining antecedents of voice quality (versus voice frequency, which has been the focus of most prior voice research), this symposium provides some practical guidance to managers who want to encourage not only more employee voice, but better employee voice, which in turn should enhance voice benefits to the organization. How Managers' Personal Control and Long-Term Orientation Impact Willingness to Seek Employee Voice Presenter: Elad Netanel Sherf; New York U. Presenter: Subrahmaniam Tangirala; U. of Maryland Open the Door Positively: The Effects of Leader Framing and Employee Affect on Prohibitive Voice Presenter: Wei He; Huazhong U. of Science and Technology Presenter: Xiao-Ping Chen; U. of Washington Presenter: Po Hao; Huazhong U. of Science and Technology Presenter: Wu Wei; Wuhan U. Getting Employees to Speak Up Isn't Enough: Conditions for Helping Leaders Create Quality Voice Presenter: John J. Sumanth; Wake Forest U. Presenter: Ozgur Demirtas; Inonu U. Presenter: Lisa Dragoni; Wake Forest U. Presenter: Sean Hannah; Wake Forest U. A Normative Model Predicting Voice Behavior and Voice Quality Presenter: Hun Whee Lee; Michigan State U. Presenter: Linn Van Dyne; Michigan State U. Killing Ideas Without Killing Future Possibilities: Managing Employee Voice Rejection Presenter: Yurianna Kim; The U. of Texas at Austin

Employee voice has been studied across a diverse range of disciplines, generating an extensive body of literature on the topic. However, its conceptualization across the disciplines has differed, resulting in a lack of integrative theories and frameworks on employee voice. The main objective of this paper is to conduct a multidisciplinary review of the academic research on employee voice, to show where there is an opportunity to adopt and adapt the findings and research on employee voice within alternate disciplines, and to demonstrate how this may lead to more common ground in the conceptualization of employee voice. This review focuses on an analysis of the Human Resource Management/Employment Relations and Organizational Behaviour disciplines' conceptualization of employee voice, beginning with the identification of where the disciplines diverged in their concept and study of employee voice. Further, it maps their similarities and differences, on the basis of motive, content, mechanism, target and management of voice. Finally, it identifies opportunities to incorporate the alternate disciplinary perspective and proposes a conceptual model, which addresses the blind spots in each discipline. It is proposed that the consideration of formal and informal employee voice in future studies will enable the better integration of voice research.

The notion of employee voice has been well established in the earlier chapters of this volume. In this chapter, the authors explore the important role of line managers in facilitating and managing employee voice. Despite the integral role that line managers play in contributing to a culture whereby voice is embedded within the organization, research on line managers and the role they play within voice regimes is an underinvestigated area. In order to better understand the line managers’ involvement in employee voice, the authors begin this chapter with an outline of and how line managers came to play such an important role in organizations. Critical components of the employee voice debates are examined before exploring in more detail the research that links line managers and employee voice. The chapter outlines areas that are underinvestigated or of growing importance in relation to the study of line managers and employee voice, including the obstacles line managers face, and how power and structure may influence line managers’ involvement in employee voice within an ever-changing work landscape.

Employee voice research has mainly focused on studying large, unionised, workplaces. Although some research has focused on examining the factors that facilitate or inhibit voice in small and medium enterprises (SMEs), there is need for more analytical research in this area because of the benefits that employee voice can bring to small organisational settings. This paper addresses this gap by examining the internal factors influencing employee voice and silence in SMEs, drawing on 87 interviews with employees and managers in 29 non-unionised SMEs operating in four European countries. The findings indicate that the employee-manager/owner relationship in SMEs is pivotal in determining employee voice or silence because of the predominant use of informal direct voice mechanisms and the often lack of an internal HR function to regulate employment relations. Our findings contribute to employee voice theory by offering a conceptualisation of the internal factors influencing voice and silence in SMEs, guides further research in this respect and discusses implications for HR practice.

This paper highlights the nature of individualistic employee voice in the context of contemporary Indian organisations. As the demand for knowledge workers increase, more organisations are finding that employee voice is critical for developing business intelligence. Yet, organisations often find their employees mostly silent despite the potential of knowledge sharing. Considering the benefits and the implicit costs associated with employee voice, the paper draws on senior executives’ accounts of employee voice that represent varied industry sectors and uses qualitative content analysis. The findings indicate broad themes around the nature, content, boundaries, avenues, and targets of voice along with its underlying mechanisms. The paper extends management perspectives on employee voice behaviour and contributes towards understanding the intricacies of individual dynamics and human experience in voice scholarship. The study has implications for Indian indigenous voice research and practice.

Voice mechanisms in organizations provide an opportunity for employees to have a say about their work. As new digital mechanisms, such as social media (SM), are being increasingly adopted by organizations for knowledge sharing, employee engagement and general communication, it is important to consider the extent to which SM may facilitate employee voice. The limited attempts to examine SM and employee voice have mostly focused on identifying the contextual factors that could promote constructive voice on SM. The extant literature does not explore how SM features may (or may not) facilitate all types of voice, such as those which promote employee interests. Adopting an affordance lens, this paper answers the call of voice scholars to explore the potential of SM as a voice mechanism by discussing the perceived value of different SM features for different types of employee voice content. The paper brings together SM and voice literature and explores how different SM affordances may potentially facilitate certain voice content more so over others. In doing so, future directions for research of voice on SM are also discussed.

Given recent studies have begun to question the siloed nature of employee voice research this paper attempts to theorise the boundaries between Organisational Behavior (OB), Human Resource Management (HRM) and Industrial and Employment Relations (I/ER) voice. Researchers examine specific organisational contexts that may influence employees' voice behavior, with OB researchers paying particular attention to the micro contextual influences of leadership behavior and psychological safety climate on individual voice behavior; HR researchers emphasizing the meso role of HR practices that may facilitate employee voice; and I/ER researchers focusing more on how macro institutional supports such as unions and collective bargaining can protect employees and facilitate voice. The paper proposes a model of “contextual voice efficacy” as a bridge between these disparate literatures, and develops propositions as to how OB, HR and I/ER voice mechanisms can combine together in a single model.