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This chapter assesses the impact of values change on the likelihood of reporting concerns for a situation of fraudulent financial reporting after a Giving Voice to Values (GVV) ethics intervention. The GVV curriculum shifts focus away from why actions are unethical to how one may effectively voice their values to resolve ethical conflict. After implementing this program in advanced accounting courses and empirically assessing the impact of the ethics intervention, the authors find that students have a stronger sense of the importance of values prescribed in professional codes of conduct and are more likely to speak up and confront unethical actions by voicing their values. GVV has the potential to increase the number of accounting professionals who are willing to speak up and confront unethical practices. The authors’ study appears to be the first to empirically test how a change in the perception of the importance of values impacts the likelihood to report concerns to members of the management hierarchy, filling an important gap in the literature.

This chapter examines the integration of Giving Voice to Values (GVV) into an accounting ethics course. GVV has received a great deal of interest by business educators in the past decade and, more recently, by those accounting faculty who teach accounting ethics in a standalone course or as part of another course. This chapter describes GVV assumptions and principles that are helpful for any faculty considering adopting GVV. After a brief review of different instructional approaches for teaching accounting ethics, GVV literature relating to accounting ethics is examined. The integration of GVV builds on the Kelly (2017) integration of leadership topics in an accounting ethics course and synergistically promotes moral motivation and moral character that contributes to ethical behavior. To facilitate the integration efforts, this chapter presents specific learning objectives, GVV background materials, case recommendations, and application/assessment approaches. This chapter concludes with a discussion of GVV and its possible role in assurance of learning efforts.

Justice research has established that voice enhances procedural justice—a phenomenon known as the ‘voice effect’—through both instrumental and non‐instrumental mechanisms. However, limited research attention has been devoted to the underlying motivational bases for the operation of one or the other explanatory mechanism in a given situation. We report the findings of two laboratory studies examining situational, motivational, and attributional underpinnings for the voice effect. We found that motivation to voice varied with characteristics of the authority to whom a grievance is directed. In both studies, an interaction revealed that non‐instrumental motivation for voice is more important when instrumental motivation is lacking or unavailable. In Study 2, we introduce the role of social attributions into research on the voice effect, finding that grievants' judgments about their objectives in using voice vary with the attributions they make about the motives behind the authority's actions. We discuss implications of our findings for both theory and practice.

The Giving Voice to Values (GVV) program takes a unique approach to ethics education by shifting the focus away from a philosophical analysis of why actions are unethical to a focus on how individuals can effectively voice their values to resolve ethical conflict. The authors explore how peer feedback and peer assessment, when implemented within a GVV module, can increase students’ understanding of ways to resolve ethical dilemmas, increase student engagement, and increase confidence in confronting unethical actions. The findings indicate that the use of peer feedback and assessment increases students’ understanding of ways to resolve ethical dilemmas, increases confidence in confronting unethical actions, and student attitudes suggest that assessing peers is a way to learn from each other and enhances interaction/engagement of students in the course. The teaching methods described in this study can easily be implemented in any specific discipline or accounting ethics course.

This paper examines the role of cultural values measured as collectivism, face-saving, and conflict-avoidance, in predicting employee voice behavior. Using data (n = 198) collected from automotive-industry employees in the United States (US) and Korea, several interesting findings emerged. First, and most notably, for a “leaver” who chooses the exit option, culture does not matter, such that none of the three cultural values have a significant association with the exit option across countries. Second, for a “stayer,” who chooses the voice, loyalty, or neglect option, culture does matter in that cultural-specific values, such as collectivism, face-saving, and conflict-avoidance were found to affect employees nonexit options in the Korean sample, but not in the U.S. sample. The results of this study suggest that these three cultural values guide and predict employee voice behavior. Additionally, the results of this study confirm that job alternatives are a significant predictor of the exit option across cultures. This study therefore presents strong empirical evidence of the effect of culture on employee voice behavior and increases our understanding of employee voice behavior across cultures.

As organizational misconduct, fraud and abuse increasingly make news headlines, public opinion is hardening against organizations that engage in illegal or unethical practices. Regulators are now acknowledging whistleblowers as frontline watchdogs, while governments are legislating to protect employees who report illegitimate conduct. However, many organizations are out of step: punishing or ignoring employees who speak up. These organizations run the risk that bad behaviour goes unchecked and that internal whistleblowers take their concerns outside the organization, creating reputational damage and potential legal ramifications. We argue that companies need to get back in step with society by encouraging employee voice as an early internal warning system to detect organizational misconduct. A five-step action plan is presented to enable management to create an ethical environment that encourages, trains and rewards employees to speak up openly about ethical concerns.

This study aims to explore the relationship between transformational leadership and employee voice behavior and the role of relational identification and work engagement as mediators in the same.

This study uses structural equation modeling to analyze the data from a questionnaire survey of 251 Taiwanese hospitality industry employees.

The findings demonstrate that transformational leadership has significant relationships with relational identification, work engagement and employee voice behavior and that relational identification and work engagement sequentially mediate between transformational leadership and employee voice behavior.

The results of this study provide insights into the intervening mechanisms linking leaders’ behavior with employees’ voices, while also highlighting the potential importance of relational identification in organizations, especially concerning the enhancement of employees’ work engagement and voice.

The findings reveal the mechanisms by which supervisors’ transformational leadership encourages employees to voice their suggestions, providing empirical evidence of the sequential mediation of relational identification and work engagement. The results help clarify the psychological process by which leaders influence their followers.

Transformational leadership (TFL) has been identified by a number of studies as a positive force for business success. However, few studies have explicitly examined its influence on the cooperative employment relationship, such as frontline employees' voice in the workplace. Thus, this study conducts an empirical analysis of dual-level (i.e. group-focused and individual-focused) TFL and its effect on frontline employees' cooperative voice.

This empirical study is based on data from a survey of 468 full-time frontline workers from 38 hotels in China.

The empirical results revealed that both individual-level and group-level TFL are significantly associated with frontline employees' cooperative voice. Person–Organization value congruence and Person–Supervisor value congruence both act as mediators in the linkage between group-level TFL and employees' cooperative voice behaviors. The partial mediating role of Demand–Ability congruence on the relationship between individual-level TFL and cooperative voice is also established.

First, this study investigates the dual-level effects of TFL on the cooperative voice behavior of frontline employees. Second, this study explores whether three dimensions of value congruence mediate the influence of TFL on the voice behaviors of employees.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of relationship between ethical leadership and employee voice behavior. Study of employee voice behavior is important, because leaders in organizations make numerous decisions based on employees’ work-related inputs which do influence the decision quality and team performance.

Survey data were collected through structured questionnaire from Indian organizations. Data were analysed through statistical techniques such as confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling.

The findings showed that ethical leadership did impact the employee voice in a positive and significant but moderate manner. The study also found no significant differences in ethical leadership and voice behavior across demographic variables such as gender, age, educational qualification and job level in the Indian context.

The study is conducted using single cross-sectional research design, and for better causal inferences of the relationship between various variables, future research studies may be conducted with longitudinal research design, multiple data sources and variety of industries with large sample size.

With erosion of ethical values and corporate scandals, managers need to develop and display ethical leadership as employees emulate their leaders’ ethical behavior because ethical leadership, or its perception, relates positively and significantly to employee voice behavior.

There is less study to understand ethical leadership and its influence on voice behavior in developing countries, especially in India. Ethical leadership behavior encourages employees to voice their work-related constructive opinions and concerns for improved decision-making and reduced unethical practices. Also, there is scarcity of research that explores the impact of demographic variables and this study is an effort to understand this gap.

The paper seeks to addresses the ethically and strategically important question: “How can managers sustain the equality of employee voice in a dynamic environment?”.

To address the above question, this paper conceptually integrates two theoretical streams that are prominent in their respective traditions: Amartya Sen's capabilities approach (SCA) in the economics and ethics literature and the dynamic capabilities approach (DCA) in strategic management.

Adapting SCA, this paper conceptualizes “voice” as employees' “capability” or “freedom” to achieve what they morally “value” in an organization, and “justice” as the equality of employee voice. Following DCA, it outlines a framework for “dynamic capability” (“voice management capability”) building by managers. It describes the processes by which executives leverage their knowledge to find new ways of creating equality in employee voice and continually remedy inequities in a changing environment. The creation of paths during the discovery of such processes and the subsequent path dependence can influence the persistence of employee voice equality.

The paper is unique in that it extends Sen's notion of “equality of individual capabilities” to employee voice. Although SCA overcomes several flaws in the competing ethics theories, it remains seriously underexplored in organizational analysis. DCA is valuable in explaining how the equality in employee voice can be sustained over time. The equality of employee voice is important not only because of its moral implications but also because of its potential desirable consequences (e.g. employee trust, commitment, and loyalty).