Reference paper:
Dyne, L. V., Ang, S., & Botero, I. C. (2003). Conceptualizing Employee Silence and Employee Voice as Multidimensional Constructs*. Journal of Management Studies, 40(6), 1359–1392.Conclusion:
(A 50-word quick summary from my understanding)
The paper concludes that employee silence and voice are separate, multidimensional constructs. A series of propositions is presented predicting that silence is more ambiguous than voice, observers are more likely to misunderstand and misattribute motives for silence than voice. This leads to more incongruent consequences in silence compared to voice.Quick Notes/queries:
(For my further delving)
Motives
- What other motives could possibly lead to silence? For example - consider a scenario where employees may choose to intentionally withhold the information until the perceived context favorability is greater. This may not be necessarily influenced by disengagement, resignation, self-protection or other-oriented motives; Consider another scenario where employee perceives his/her supervisor as incapable and misappropriating undue recognitions, in which case s/he may choose to intentionally withhold certain information.
- Could expressing of work-related ideas, information or opinions - based on malicious intents - with the goal of taking revenge against a peer, supervisor, collective or organization be categorized as specific type of voice? What about silence based on malicious motives directed at individual, collective or organization?
- Consider a scenario where an employee, who becomes aware of the fact that his 'ABC' is disengaged from work, decides to speak up to his supervisor. In the voicing episode, he could choose to simply state the facts ('ABC seems very unproductive since last few days'), provide discretionary opinion as to why it could be so ('ABC is probably unproductive as he is apparently not finding the job challenging'), provide discretionary suggestions of addressing the issue ('ABC could probably be assigned more challenging jobs') or share discretionary ideas of how the issue could be best addressed ('ABC should be provided an opportunity to also work on other more challenging tasks such as...'). As can be seen the employee could choose to be selective in his inputs despite having more potentially critical and useful inputs. What explains this behavior of selectively holding giving the best physical, cognitive or emotional inputs while speaking up?
Misattributions
- How can individuals influence the observer misunderstanding and misattributions of voice/silence motives, and thereby attenuate negative consequences?
- Since observer's perception of focal employee's motive for voicing is influenced not only by message, but also by subtle speech cues, back-channel communication and general body language, is the choice of the medium to voice (such as face-to-face or computer mediated communication) influenced by media richness? Which medium causes greater ambiguity in attributing employee motive for voice? Is it dependent on individual and/or contextual factors?
Decision making
- In proactive behaviors, how do individuals arrive at decisions to voice or remain silent? For ex - how does an employee typically evaluate whether expression of ideas is personally risky?