Abstract
Team communication is considered a key factor for team performance. Importantly, voicing concerns and suggestions regarding work-related topics—also termed speaking up—represents an essential part of team communication. Particularly in action teams in high-reliability organizations such as healthcare, military, or aviation, voice is crucial for error prevention. Although research on voice has become more important recently, there are inconsistencies in the literature. This includes methodological issues, such as how voice should be measured in different team contexts, and conceptual issues, such as uncertainty regarding the role of the voice recipient. We tried to address these issues of voice research in action teams in the current literature review. We identified 26 quantitative empirical studies that measured voice as a distinct construct. Results showed that only two-thirds of the articles provided a definition for voice. Voice was assessed via behavioral observation or via self-report. Behavioral observation includes two main approaches (i.e., event-focused and language-focused) that are methodologically consistent. In contrast, studies using self-reports showed significant methodological inconsistencies regarding measurement instruments (i.e., self-constructed single items versus validated scales). The contents of instruments that assessed voice via self-report varied considerably. The recipient of voice was poorly operationalized (i.e., discrepancy between definitions and measurements). In sum, our findings provide a comprehensive overview of how voice is treated in action teams. There seems to be no common understanding of what constitutes voice in action teams, which is associated with several conceptual as well as methodological issues. This suggests that a stronger consensus is needed to improve validity and comparability of research findings.
Highlights
Consider a junior employee at a marketing team meeting and a nurse working on an emergency response team who voice their concerns regarding incorrect procedures
We suggest that voice research would benefit from better integrating emergent states such as team mental models or intra-team trust, which have been shown to play an important role in action teams (Burtscher and Manser 2012; Burtscher et al 2018a, b)
It would be worthwhile to investigate how specific hand gestures might relate to voice expression and effectiveness. This is the first systematic review of the literature on voice in action teams, which critically considers the treatment of voice in practice
Summary
Consider a junior employee at a marketing team meeting and a nurse working on an emergency response team who voice their concerns regarding incorrect procedures. Both speak up about work-related topics (Morrison 2014) with the intention of preventing negative consequences for the respective organization (Ashford et al 2009). In case of the nurse, speaking up about errors and mistakes can help to identify hazards and prevent patient harm, in extreme cases death (Lin and Johnson 2015; Noort et al 2019) Teams in settings such as this are commonly referred. Mistakes in other team settings, such as the marketing team in our example, might lead to adverse outcomes, such as losing customers or damaging the organizations’ reputation, but errors in those settings usually have less severe consequences
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