Influence and Inequality: Worker Identities and Assessments of Influence over Workplace Decisions

Abstract

Though research shows that diversity and equity in the workplace lead to more innovation and other positive outcomes for organizations, businesses often struggle to accomplish their diversity, equity, and inclusion goals. Promoting employee voice is one strategy to support equity; however, employee perceptions of who has a voice at work may be increasingly unbalanced in the post-2020 workplace. Thus, drawing from an original survey dataset of workers across 20 countries and regions (n = 9197), we use logistic regression to explore how sociodemographic characteristics and perceptions of inclusion at work predict whether participants believe they help influence important decisions at work (our measure of employee voice). Across our global sample, we found that although feelings of inclusion predict the perception that one has more voice, workers who belong to groups historically marginalized in the workplace due to gender, education level, compensation type, leadership status, and self-identified “minority” status report lower levels of agreement with the statement of voice. We conclude that while promoting feelings of inclusion is one strategy for achieving a greater diversity of employee voices at work, organizations should also take concrete steps (such as diversifying leadership) to reach equity more fully regarding voice.