Loading...
Toward a Theory of Voice Motives
Jo, Jinhwan
Jo, Jinhwan
Citations
Altmetric:
Abstract
In an unpredictable and dynamic economy, it may be hard for leaders and managers to figure it out all from the top. The increasing uncertainty and complexity of work offers them with new challenges to foresee, identify, and react to the opportunities and threats that are coming from the business environment. As a result, leaders and managers need employees express constructive voice–expressing thoughts (e.g., ideas, suggestions, concerns, or opinions) about ways to make functional change in the organization. Researchers provided evidence that constructive voice enables organizations to obtain creative ideas that increase the likelihood of innovation (Zhou & George, 2001), foster divergent thinking that enhances the quality of decision making (Nemeth, 1986), and identify issues that are strategically important for organizational change (Dutton & Ashford, 1993). Organizations without constructive voice from employees may fail to obtain innovative thoughts from below and identify problems that are detected by employees (Li, Liao, Tangirala, & Firth, 2017). Given the organizational consequences of constructive voice, it is not surprising that researchers attempted to identify multiple antecedents of constructive voice ranging from individual (e.g., emotion regulation knowledge, personal influence) to organizational (e.g., leader openness, group voice climate) characteristics (Detert & Burris, 2007; Grant, 2013; Morrison, Wheeler-Smith, & Kamdar, 2011; Tangirala & Ramanujam, 2012). Most research on the antecedents of constructive voice primarily focused on the roles of two factors including psychological safety (i.e., whether voice has negative personal consequences) and voice efficacy (i.e. whether voice is successful in making the intended change) in explaining why the antecedents predict constructive voice (Morrison, 2011, 2014). Obviously, constructive voice is risky because it challenges the status quo and those who are in charge of organizational functioning. For a similar reason, constructive voice cannot be always acted upon by leaders, which makes investing time and effort in offering constructive ideas is a waste. Thus, primary focus on psychological safety and voice efficacy as important predictors of constructive voice has a sound basis in logic (Burris, Detert, & Chiaburu, 2008; Liang, Farh, & Farh, 2012). However, research on psychological safety and voice efficacy does not provide understanding of why employees engage in constructive voice in the first place. Both psychological safety and voice efficacy are not the fundamental motives that drive people to engage in constructive voice but the facilitators that make people with voice motives feel ease and worthwhile to express their thoughts about ways to improve the organization (Morrison, 2011). In other words, employees who have no reasons to offer constructive ideas to the organization or specific goals to achieve through their voice behavior may not engage in constructive voice even in a situation where they think it is safe to speak up and their voice can be well received by important decision makers at work. Against this backdrop, the purpose of this dissertation research was to identify a taxonomy of motives underlying constructive voice. Ten voice motives were derived by synthesizing the voice literature across different disciplines including human resources, organizational behavior, industrial relations, political science, psychology, communication, strategy, and ethics. The ten motives include acquisitive, status, fulfilling, beneficent, protective, authentic, organizational exchange, leader exchange, accountable, and normative motives. To test the taxonomy of voice motives, I developed the Voice Motives Scale (VMS) and assessed the validity and reliability of the scale. Overall, I found strong support for the voice motives taxonomy. Participants in the content validity study easily matched most of the items for measuring voice motives with a corresponding definition. An exploratory factor analysis revealed 9-factor structure, giving empirical evidence supporting for the voice motives taxonomy. Items for measuring organizational exchange motives and those for leader exchange motives were loaded onto a single factor. I decided to remove leader exchange motives from the taxonomy because it can be subsumed under organizational exchange motives. Two confirmatory factor analyses using different samples and methodologies also supported the 9-factor model. Each item loaded on its hypothesized factor, and latent constructs accounted for more variance in their corresponding items than these constructs for the other voice motives. Additionally, the voice motives generally exhibited moderate or strong relationships with their corresponding comparison constructs and possessed adequate factor-level discriminant validity, given that they are empirically distinguishable from each other. Advancing understanding of the motives underlying constructive voice behavior is important because it helps shift scholarly focus from the facilitators of the behavior to the actual motivators of it. This shift may allow scholars to identify and examine unique antecedents of constructive voice that relate to voice motives, as well as understand why the common voice antecedents identified by prior work lead to constructive voice given that motives are proximal predictors of behavior. With understanding of voice motives, scholars may also be able to have a richer understanding of the behavior itself as well as voice receivers’ responses to voice considering that motives may affect the nature (e.g., quality, emotional expressions, repetitiveness) of the behavior.
Description
Date
2020-01-01
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Kansas
Collections
Archive Status
This item contains archived web content.
Files
Jo_ku_0099D_17341_DATA_1.pdf
Adobe PDF, 1.62 MB
- Embargoed until 2170-05-31
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
Management, Employee voice, Responses to employee voice, Voice motives