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Despite the increasing prominence of employee voice in organizational innovation and productivity, employees continue to struggle to influence matters that affect them at work. The purpose of this paper is to model work group context and manager behavior as the predictors of employee upward voice. Further, a mediating role of employee psychological safety is examined in this link.

With data from 575 employees representing various technology firms in India, the authors test the hypothesized relationships using covariance-based structural equation modeling.

Results indicate coworkers upward voice and manager pro-voice behavior to significantly impact employee upward voice with a mediating impact of psychological safety. This implies that perceived psychological safety plays a significant role in explaining the impact, coworkers and manager behavior would have on regulating employee upward voice.

This study contributes to the employee voice literature from an Indian context, where upward communication is culturally discouraged.

This paper aims to model how an employee’s proactive personality and manager’s pro-voice behaviour help to predict employee upward voice. Employee perceived voice efficacy is expected to mediate these links.

To analyse the data, a confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling procedure using AMOS 22 were used. The mediating role of voice efficacy was tested with bootstrapping method. Data included 625 employees representing various technology firms in India.

The results showed a significant positive impact of employee proactive personality and manager pro-voice behaviour on employee upward voice. Further, findings suggest significant mediation of employee voice efficacy beliefs in these links.

The study extends employee voice literature from an Indian context, where confronting those in authority is culturally discouraged. Contributing to the scant work on voice self-efficacy, its role as a key mechanism impacting employee upward voice is examined.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of affiliative-based humorous leadership on hotel employee outcomes (i.e. resistance to change and upward voice), underpinned by affective events theory. Further, this paper investigates psychological capital as a mediation effect and emotional intelligence as a moderation effect.

Using a structured questionnaire, 554 supervisors of 20 four- and five-star hotels in Sharm El-Sheikh responded based on a time-lagged approach. A Smart-partial least squares (Smart-PLS) v. 3.3.9 was used to analyze the data set.

The findings revealed that affiliative-based humorous leadership has a positive effect on psychological capital, and psychological capital has a positive association with employee upward voice. Psychological capital partially mediated the linkage of humorous leadership with employees' upward voices and resistance to change. According to the results, emotional intelligence strengthened the linkage of psychological capital with employee resistance to change and upward voice.

The findings contribute to the body of knowledge on humor and the development of new ideas in the hospitality literature. This paper adds to the hospitality literature on humorous leadership in developing countries, specifically in Egypt. This paper also provides practitioners with new perspectives as they develop strategies and use humor-related wise leadership styles in the workplace.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first studies to assess affiliative-based humor in leadership in the hospitality industry. This paper contributes to future studies on the crucial effect of workplace engagement and its association with employees’ novel and intriguing actions and offers a good guideline for organizations and enterprises wishing to better leverage leader humor.

Integrating individual and relational centric voice literature, the authors draw on self-presentation theory to analyse the role of status pursuit in employee voice. Status pursuit is believed to be ubiquitous as it is linked to access to scarce resources and social order pecking.

The authors present a cross-level conceptual model outlining relational nuances of employee status pursuit that drive upward voice.

The model integrates status pursuit with peer- and leader-related facets, focusing on three targets of voice: immediate leader (supervisor), diagonal leader (supervisor of another team/unit) and co-workers. The model highlights how employee voice can be directed to diverse targets, and depending on interpersonal attributes, how it serves as underlying links for upward voice.

While employee voice can help to address important workplace concerns, it can also be used to advance employees' self-interest. Though there is a wealth of research on the importance of employee voice to organisational performance and individual wellbeing, especially through collective representation such as trade unions, there is a lack of literature on how employees navigate the social-relational work setting to promote their interests and develop status.

The purpose of this paper is to present an exploratory study of employee voice and silence in international auditing firms. The authors examine two key questions: what is the propensity of employees in training to speak up on workplace problems and how would management react to employees in training speaking up on workplace problems?

The authors compare and contrast the views of employees on training contracts with management including partners. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with eight managers/partners and 20 employees working in six large auditing firms in Ireland.

The authors find that employees on training contracts have a high propensity to remain silent on workplace problems. Quiescent and acquiescent forms of silence were evident. Management expressed willingness to act on employee voice on workplace problems concerning business improvements and employee performance but were very resistant to voice in regard to a change in working conditions or a managers’ performance. Employees and management couched employee voice in terms of technical knowledge exchange rather than being associated with employee dissatisfaction or having a say in decision making.

The authors highlight how new professional employees are socialised into understanding that employee voice is not a democratic right and the paper provides insight on the important role of partners as owner/managers in perpetuating employee silence. Previous research on owner/managers has tended to focus on small businesses while the auditing firms in this study have large numbers of employees.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the discursive tactics that employees use when they speak up on internal social media (ISM) to gain support for their cause, and how this can develop into a “spiral of voice” when organizational members interact with each other on ISM.

The study is based on screenshots of four months of coworker communication on ISM in a Danish bank and on semi-structured interviews with 24 employees.

Employees succeeded in speaking up and gaining support on ISM by using eight different discursive tactics. These tactics helped move organizational issues from an operational to a strategic level, thus making the issues relevant for management as well as gaining the support of other coworkers. The visibility and persistence of communication on ISM forced managers to react.

Further research should investigate whether similar tactics and reactions occur in organizations with a less open communication culture where it might be less safe for employees to speak up.

Organizations need to be aware of the dynamics of the “spiral of voice” and of the way in which the visibility and persistence of communication on ISM forces managers to handle organizational issues.

This study is the first to explore what happens when employees speak up on ISM and to propose the concept of “a spiral of voice” as an extension of the theory of “the spiral of silence” (Noelle-Neumann, 1974).

To boost efficiency and productivity, organizations are increasingly depending upon employees to speak up about workplace concerns and disagreements. This change-oriented bottom-up communication, termed employee voice behavior, brings attention to workplace issues that could otherwise go undetected by management. This study examined the relationships between personality characteristics, job attitudes, and employee voice behavior, and investigated the moderating role of extraversion on the relationships between job attitudes (i.e., job satisfaction and turnover intentions) and voice.

A cross-sectional study design was used, with data collected through an online survey from a sample of 284 individuals working in the US. Hypotheses were tested using correlation, regression and moderation analyzes.

Job satisfaction and turnover intentions were found to be positively and negatively-related, respectively, to employee voice behavior. Extraversion was found to be predictive of employee voice behavior and moderate the relationships between job attitudes and voice behavior. Interestingly, results suggest that the job attitudes of individuals high in extraversion do not influence their likelihood of speaking up. Rather, voice behaviors of only those with low or moderate levels of extraversion are impacted by their job attitudes.

This study builds upon prior research identifying the importance of extraversion in predicting voice behavior by testing its incremental validity and relative weight, compared to the other Big Five personality characteristics. Furthermore, this research contributes to the theoretical understanding of instances in which employee voice behavior occurs by examining the moderating effect of extraversion on the relationship between job attitudes and employee voice behavior.

This study examines the yin (promotive) and yang (prohibitive) of employee voice based on employee preference for voice channel attributes. Employee inputs may be disregarded, requiring employees to maneuver for unheeded voice and adopt alternate voice tactics. The authors emphasize the ubiquity of lurking employee silence and its affective effects on subsequent cycles of voice or silence.

Qualitative design involving semi-structured interviews of employees from service sector firms in India assisted the inquiry.

Employees prefer voice channel attributes that ensure visibility and data substance for promotive voice and anonymity and confidentiality for prohibitive voice. Voice target switching and message reframing were common employee strategies. Silence on both sharing views/opinions (promotive) and voicing issues/concerns (prohibitive) weakens employee future voice incidents, besides suppressing the affect. Post-silence cognitive reappraisal increases voice incidences.

Findings may have limited generalizability given the qualitative design of the study. Moving beyond extant episodic voice research, the authors demonstrate the recurrent nature of employee voice and silence. The study broadens perspectives on how varied voice types necessitate nuanced voice channel attributes.

Present work brings together organizational behavior (OB) perspective on discretionary voice through human resource (HR)-based channels, helping bridge the gap between previously disparate stands.

To investigate how HRM in an established organization can support employee voice and engage employees to be innovative in their everyday lived experience.

The research is based on a case study of an innovation event in an organization, where 27 employees were interviewed about the emotional, cognitive and behavioral aspects of their engagement in innovation.

Findings highlight the importance of continuing HRM's involvement during an entire event process to connect innovation events with everyday work. HRM has a central role in initiatives that intend to support voice and stimulate the engagement of diverse employees in innovation in established firms.

This was a qualitative and cross-sectional case study of one organization and one event offered two years in a row.

In order to promote innovation, HR and senior management should foster an environment that motivates employees and promotes voice behavior (Morrison, 2014). HRM can create multiple methods of engagement, acknowledging the diversity of the workforce profile and its specific needs. HRM has an important role within an innovation strategy; as it can, together with other areas, create, develop and maintain actions that support and recognize innovative ideas and encourage employees to become actively engaged with the inclusion of innovation in their daily work life. Specifically, innovation exercises are an activity with much potential to foster voice and promote engagement towards innovation.

We develop a model proposing relationships between HRM, employee voice, employee engagement, cross-department collaboration and innovation. The study also considers the engagement of a diverse group of employees in an established company context.