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The study aimed to understand the significance of how employee personhood and the act of speaking up is shaped by factors such as employees' professional status, length of employment within their hospital sites, age, gender and their ongoing exposure to unprofessional behaviours.

Responses to a survey by 4,851 staff across seven sites within a hospital network in Australia were analysed to interrogate whether speaking up by hospital employees is influenced by employees' symbolic capital and situated subjecthood (SS). The authors utilised a Bourdieusian lens to interrogate the relationship between the symbolic capital afforded to employees as a function of their professional, personal and psycho-social resources and their self-reported capacity to speak up.

The findings indicate that employee speaking up behaviours appear to be influenced profoundly by whether they feel empowered or disempowered by ongoing and pre-existing personal and interpersonal factors such as their functional roles, work-based peer and supervisory support and ongoing exposure to discriminatory behaviours.

The findings from this interdisciplinary study provide empirical insights around why culture change interventions within healthcare organisations may be successful in certain contexts for certain staff groups and fail within others.

The purpose of this paper is to explore why executives participating in a top management team meeting avoid speaking up when they experience the goal as unclear or the discussion as wandering off track.

A total of 21 executives (CEOs and level 2 managers) from seven top management teams were interviewed, and the interviews analyzed according to the principles of Grounded Theory.

The executives’ silence was primarily governed by a core belief that to speak up about miscommunication is a negative act, which will probably elicit undesirable consequences. This assumption was reinforced by how the executives perceived themselves, other persons and relationships in the group, group norms, and the issue discussed in the meeting. In addition, three other basic beliefs prevented the level 2 managers from speaking up: “We have no tradition for speaking up in this group”, “It's futile to speak up”, and “It's not part of my role to speak up in this group”.

The data were collected from executives representing only seven top management teams from the public sector in Norway, limiting the generalizability of the findings. Future research should increase the number and types of top management teams from which informants are drawn.

Executives should be aware of how their beliefs and perceptions prevent them from voicing their concerns when experiencing miscommunication during the TMT meeting, and how remaining silent in these matters represents an important barrier to team effectiveness in the meetings.

The study shows that even among executives at the top of the organizational hierarchy, people refrain from speaking up when experiencing miscommunication, and that there are more reasons for not voicing concerns than fear of consequences and feelings of futility.

The purpose of this paper is to find how leader humility affects employees’ constructive voice behavior toward supervisor (speaking up) and coworkers (speaking out) from an identification-based perspective, and seeks to verify the effectiveness of leader humility in the Chinese context.

Data were collected from 325 employees in four Chinese companies with two phases. In the first phase, the participants were asked to report the leader humility, their identification of their relations with the supervisor, and their identification with their organization. In the second phase, they were asked to report their voice behaviors toward their supervisors and coworkers.

The results indicate that leader humility strongly predicts both employees’ voice behaviors of speaking up and speaking out. Results further suggest that relational identification with the supervisor explains why leader humility promotes employees speaking up, while organizational identification explains why leader humility promotes employees speaking up and speaking out.

Managers with humility can successfully shape employees’ relational and organizational identifications, which in turn encourage their voice behaviors toward supervisors and coworkers. Hence, behaving humbly in working places could be an effective way for managers to promote organizational cohesion and creativity.

Although leader humility attracts much attention in both academia and practice, researchers have been primarily focusing on conceptual development and measurement issues, and empirical studies are rare. This is the first research connecting leader humility and employee proactive behaviors. Moreover, it takes an in-depth analysis of the constructive voice behaviors by differentiating them based on their targets.

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).

Mastery of spoken English is a priority for many learners of English in Iran. Opportunities to acquire spoken English through the public school system are very limited, hence many students enroll in “conversation” courses in private institutes. The purpose of this paper is to report a study of how institute teachers address the teaching of spoken English.

Eighty-nine teachers completed a questionnaire on how they teach spoken English. The information was supplemented with interviews and classroom observation.

Results suggest that institute courses reflect a poor understanding of the nature of spoken interaction, which is reflected in speaking courses that are unfocused and that do not address key aspects of conversational interaction.

Suggestions are given for a re-examination of the differences between “conversation” and “discussion” in spoken English classes as the basis for designing spoken English classes and materials, as well as for the use of out-of-class learning opportunities to enhance the learning of spoken English in Iran and elsewhere.

This paper is based on the authors’ original research, and the authors believe this is the first study of its kind in the Iranian context.

IBM, one of the best‐managed organisations in the world, has pioneered a very useful technique called Speak Up! Basically, Speak Up! is designed both to improve upward communication and to supplement other employee communication efforts. In detail the objectives of the programme are to:

This study aims to identify the specific challenges that North American female professionals of Asian descent face in building executive presence and make recommendations for mitigating those challenges.

In-depth interviews were conducted with 14 female executives of Asian descent in diverse U.S. and Canadian organizations. The goal was to explore their perceptions of Asian organizational stereotypes and identify how these perceptions, shaped by their cultural and gender identities, have created unique challenges relating to executive presence. Interviewees provided in-depth examples of their challenges and detailed recommendations for neutralizing them. Interview data were coded and analyzed using the Gioia methodology.

Results revealed that deferential, reserved and hardworking are the top three perceptions attributed to female professionals of Asian descent working in North America. These perceptions are not commendatory or derogatory by themself. They can be associated with either positive or negative leadership qualities, depending on the specific behaviors exhibited and how those behaviors are interpreted. The authors’ analysis maps the relationship between these perceptions and behaviors associated with the executive presence literature. The respondents’ three key recommendations for neutralizing the negative connotations of these perceptions are discussed.

The results of this study reinforce the need to develop influence, communication and relational skills (e.g. executive presence) in women of Asian ethnicity. The study respondents’ recommendations provide a foundational curriculum guide for doing so. The results also support the need to train hiring managers to become ever more aware of their cultural biases, focusing on how these biases impact their hiring, performance evaluation and promotion practices.

There is a dearth of research regarding the career experiences of Asian women working in North American corporations. This qualitative study provides insight into relationships between cultural identity, executive presence and career success and lays the groundwork for future quantitative studies that deepen a theoretical understanding of the relationship of executive presence to impression management and cross-cultural theories.

Drawing on a costs-benefit analysis perspective, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between managerial openness and employee voice and its boundary conditions.

This study collected three waves of data by surveying 326 pairs of employees and their supervisors. The hypotheses were tested by using Hayes’s (2018) SPSS macro application with a bootstrap approach to obtain confidence intervals.

Managerial openness facilitates employee voice by decreasing perceived voice costs. Felt obligation positively moderates the direct as well as the indirect relationship between perceived voice costs and employee voice.

This study uncovers the alternative mechanism underlying the relationship between managerial openness and employee voice as well as the boundary condition of this relationship.

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.