Loyalty, Voice, and Intent to Exit a Union Firm: A Conceptual and Empirical Analysis

Abstract

Drawing on economics and organizational behavior concepts, the authors develop a model of employee “voice” (defined in terms of the frequency of grievance filing) and employee intent to exit the firm. They test the model using data on a sample of nonmanagement employees of a large multinational telecommunications firm in 1991. Employees' loyalty to the firm and their perception of the grievance procedure's effectiveness are the main independent variables. In tests that focus exclusively on employees who reported having been treated unfairly by the employer at some time, loyalty is found to have had a consistently strong negative association with both the exercise of voice and intent to exit the firm. One implication of these findings is that loyal employees who experienced unfair workplace treatment primarily responded by suffering in silence.