Antecedents And Mechanism Of Voice: When And Why Employees Speak Up

Voice, defined as non-required behavior that emphasizes expression of constructive challenge with an intention to improve status quo, is an important mechanism for initiating change and innovation in organizations. This paper presents two studies that mainly examine what employees think about as they decide whether or not to voice and how they make a choice. The purpose of Study 1 is to shed light on the why employees sometimes decide to voice regardless of its risks and sometimes prefer to withholding their ideas. The author interviewed 25 employees and found most had been in situations where they were reluctant to voice. At the contextual level and individual level, supportive leadership and personal personality were the most concerned factors when employees considered whether or not to voice. From the data, a model of how employees decide to voice was developed, and this is the first study exploring the decision-making process of voice carried out in China.The purpose of study 2 is to examine the impact of proactive personality and perceived supervisor support on voice behavior. As expected, proactive personality and perceived supervisor support both made a great positive contribution to employee voice behavior. In addition, it was found that employees'voice behavior was more highly predicted by proactive personality than perceived supervisor support, which demonstrated individual characteristics may outweigh contextual characteristics when it comes to voice behavior. Unexpectedly, the interaction effect between proactive personality and perceived supervisor support was mutually complementary. The findings also showed that role breadth self-efficacy explained the psychological process by which proactive personality and perceived supervisor support influenced voice behavior. The paper discusses implications of these findings for voice research, as well as for managerial practices.