Thomas Ng, Lorenzo Lucianetti, Dennis Hsu, Frederick Yim & Kelly Sorensen

In contemporary organizations, managers and practitioners have been actively promoting their employees to speak out in the workplace, as empirical evidence continues to point out that employee voice (that is, employees making constructive change-oriented suggestions), can benefit organizational improvement, productivity, and innovation in most cases. Despite their efforts to promote greater employee voice, managers and practitioners continue to find that many employees are distressed by and apprehensive about speaking out and therefore choose to remain silent, even when there have been opportunities and reasons to say something. This can be frustrating for managers and practitioners who might be in need of employees’ candid and improvement-oriented suggestions for ensuring that the organization will survive and thrive.

Voice is risky. One possible reason for employee silence is the worries about how others might take their voice. In other words, employees are highly concerned about the social risks inherent in their suggestions and would rather stay muted. Hence, perhaps blindly encouraging employees to speak out without understanding employees’ social concerns is one main reason why there is still widespread silence in the workplace, in spite of the significance of employee voice.

Promoting confidence and instrumentality beliefs is the key. We empirically studied whether and why seeing coworkers speak out may increase the likelihood of employees speak out themselves. It serves to illustrate to managers and practitioners that they should probably consider an alternative, and a relatively more subtle, route to promote voice, which is to facilitate voice contagion among employees. Voice contagion occurs when an employee follows others’ (e.g., coworkers’) lead to speak out with constructive suggestions. Through a field study and two scenario experiments, this study highlights two core reasons why employees want to imitate coworkers’ voice.

The first is pertinent to confidence. Having the confidence to speak out is important because there are likely many hurdles in the voice process; for instance, the employee might be seen as a trouble-maker or disrupting the long-time status quo. Speaking out might also upset others, especially if the suggestion challenges others’ current views and approaches or requires others to alter their routines or take on more new tasks. Therefore, employees have to really believe that their voice is going to bring positive and functional changes, despite the social costs and inconveniences created. This is where seeing coworker speak out comes to play. When employees see coworkers speak out, they have an example to learn from in terms of what to say, when to say, and how to say it. Coworkers’ voice functions as good examples for employees to build their scripts and learn to execute voice better. When employees have successfully gained stronger confidence in their abilities to execute their voice, they should in turn speak out more.

The second route is related to the instrumentality of voice, which captures employees’ belief that their voice will facilitate the attainment of desired resources and goals. Those employees who have witnessed coworkers’ voice can more easily understand the importance and usefulness of an exemplary behavior compared to when employees do not witness any voice. Coworkers’ engagement in a benevolent and altruistic behavior (e.g., voice) facilitates the growth of the employee’s belief that such behavior is useful, important, and broadly appreciated by the organization. With an enhanced instrumentality belief about the importance and utility of voice, employees are likely to follow coworkers’ lead and initiate voice themselves, too.

Means of cultivating functional beliefs. Therefore, for managers and practitioners who aim to promote voice, they should dedicate efforts to (a) build employee confidence to speak out, and (b) enable employees to recognize the utility and importance of speaking out. For instance, managers and practitioners can promote more teamwork or design job tasks to be interdependent in nature. That way, employees will have more chances to observe and learn from each other’s voice. Similarly, the use of more team meetings in which workers are given ample voice opportunities, the removal of communication barriers in social networks, the open sharing of comments on each other’s suggestions, providing encouragement to employees to learn from each other, and clarifying the significance of voice and why it is appreciated and valued by the organization may all be beneficial to the whole organization in terms of promoting voice contagion and firm performance.

The full study published in the Journal of Management Studies can be found here.