مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Employee voice – the expression of challenging but constructive opinions, concerns, or ideas about work-related issues (Detert & Burris, 2007; Tangirala & Ramanujam, 2008; Van Dyne & LePine, 1998; Whiting, Maynes, Podsakoff, & Podsakoff, 2012) – has been increasingly recognized as a critical input affecting organizational functioning and well-being (Edmondson, 2003; Morrison & Milliken, 2000). In understanding this phenomenon, prior research has shown employee voice to be affected by a variety of factors such as employees’ personal attributes (e.g., Crant, Kim, & Wang, 2010; LePine & Van Dyne, 2001), perceptions about and attitudes toward the organization (Fuller et al., 2006; Liang, Farh, & Farh, 2012; Tangirala & Ramanujam, 2008) and the behaviors of leaders (Detert & Burris, 2007; Liu, Zhu, & Yang, 2010; Tangirala & Ramanujam, 2012).

Although this prior research has made considerable progress, one important area that has, surprisingly, gone largely unexplored relates to the ‘‘effects of one’s colleagues and relationships with one’s colleagues on the decision of whether to engage in voice” (Morrison, 2014, p. 191). Employee voice inherently challenges the status quo and points to needs for changing or improving processes and procedures that may have been instituted by other team members or the team leader and might potentially affect others’ work. As a result, speaking up with one’s concerns and ideas may entail substantial risk for employees (Milliken, Morrison, & Hewlin, 2003; Van Dyne & LePine, 1998) unless they also have supportive relationships with their coworkers and leaders and know that speaking up is viewed as appropriate by them. Thus, the study of employee voice would be quite incomplete without understanding how social and relational factors at work may influence such behaviors.

In addressing this gap, the current paper uses a relational, social network framework in examining how employees’ and their leaders’ formal and informal relationships at work may impact employee voice. Compared to most other research in the social sciences (including that of employee voice) that takes an atomistic or ‘‘individual as an independent entity” perspective (i.e., focusing on individual attributes such as personality traits), network theory argues that an individual’s behaviors (such as voice) can be best understood by taking a relational perspective (i.e., studying the nature of individuals’ dyadic relationships and structural positions in the network of such relationships; Borgatti, Brass, & Halgin, 2014).