Does Political Savviness Enhance Employee Voice? Speaking Up when Coworkers are Ostracized

Abstract

Given that organizations are functions of intricate and interpersonal systems, the severity and pervasiveness of workplace ostracism – defined as the extent to which an individual perceives he or she is being ignored in the workplace – can have devastating effects on both employee and organizational outcomes. Much of the literature has largely established workplace ostracism to be a dyadic event between the perpetrator and the target by mainly examining targets’ reactions from a need-threat perspective. Yet, as individual employees interact with and are often nested within a team environment, ostracism may impact not only the target but also the other individuals that share the same social context (i.e., group members, coworkers). To address the understudied indirect effects of workplace ostracism on third parties, this study adopts a social information processing approach to examine how the ostracism of an employee’s coworkers affects his or her own work outcomes such as voice behavior. We contend that individuals are not merely passive recipients of the social environment but can utilize their abilities and knowledge (i.e., political savviness) to successfully navigate socially disruptive environments. A study was conducted involving a sample of 154 employees and their supervisors from a large biotechnology firm in China. The results showed that employees were less likely to engage in voice behaviors when their coworkers were ostracized in the workplace. The study also revealed a significant three-way interaction effect between political understanding and political skill on the relationship between coworkers’ ostracism and employee voice, supporting the notion that political savviness is a valuable resource in mitigating ostracism’s negative effects. Organizational implications, recommendations and future research ideas are also discussed.