Employee voice in the Asia Pacific

Abstract

Over the past 35 years, since Farrell (1983) first applied Hirschman's (1970) concept of voice in relation to employees and Freeman and Medoff (1984) brought in the role of unions, we have accumulated a vast body of literature concerning employee voice. This research has largely spanned across employment relations, human resource management, organisational behaviour and labor economics disciplines (Wilkinson and Fay 2011). This has provided us with greater insights concerning the institutional and organisational factors that may contribute to the establishment and management of both direct and indirect employee voice mechanisms, along with the delineation of antecedents that may encourage employees to engage in voice behaviour directly with managers. Thus, the notion of employee voice has moved from its traditional roots of indirect, representative union forms of voice, to one that is more inclusive of direct employee–manager interactions (Mowbray, Wilkinson and Tse 2015). Employee voice is now seen, therefore, as the opportunity to have a say over employee and employer interests and to participate in organisational decision‐making (Barry and Wilkinson 2016), as well as a discretionary behaviour whereby employees may raise ideas, issues, opinions and concerns in order to bring about change (Morrison 2014).