Twentieth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

While voice is critical to organizational functioning and performance, employees are often afraid to speak up, and rather remain silent. The decision of whether to voice or not is influenced by employees’ anticipation of voice targets’ (leader, team) reactions to their suggestions. Such reactions depend on the voice content (degree of challenge or threat for others) and the openness of the voice target (openness to suggestions for change). We look at two targets of voice, leaders and colleagues, in a sample of 157 triads (employee-colleague-leader). We found that the nature of the voice content is less crucial for the decision whether to speak up, when leader openness is high than when it is low. In the latter case, employees are more likely to speak out or stay silent. For team openness (psychological safety), we found that when psychological safety was high, people were more silent about the voice content with low degree of challenge than with high degree of challenge. This was also the case for low psychological safety, which was surprising.