Affective underpinnings of voice effectiveness

Based on the a paper on dual tuning effects of positive and negative emotion on creativity by Jennifer M. George and Jing Zhou, here are some initial thoughts on how to me affect seems to influence employee voice effectiveness.

What influences voice effectiveness?

Based on inputs by my research guide and mentor, I began looking at the question of when is employee voice effective. Here are some of my initial thoughts -

Pertinent realities

A couple of days back I began my morning browsing the headline story on the closely guarded hanging of one of the accused terrorists. A skeptic that I am, I wondered whether the accused was really hanged or was he still kept secretly alive for some reason that a common man such as I may not fathom. As the question soon faded, a more basic one popped up - "Do I really care about the veracity of the matter?". In so questioning I did not realize that I had inadvertently embarked on a journey toward understanding truth.

Two + two

Of late, there are a few questions that are taking up too much of my mind share. The commonality of these questions is that they appear elementary and seem to frequent more often than due. Every time they occur they cajole me into unfolding them, and in the process they beget more questions and leave me increasingly embittered by my inadequacies to find any reasonable answers.

Defining entrepreneurship

The term 'entrepreneurship' first appeared in the French Dictionary 'Dictionnaire Universal de Commerce' in 1723. Richard Cantillon is considered to be the first economist to define who an entrepreneur is. In his seminal book 'Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général', considered the first complete treatise on economics, he defines entrepreneur as non-fixed income earner who pays known costs of production but earns uncertain incomes, due to the speculative nature of pandering to an unknown demand for his/her production (Wikipedia). Since then, perhaps no other term has been redefined, reinterpreted and conveniently adapted with such plasticity across theory and practice.

Deciding to voice

Voice behavior, which is defined as discretionary communication of ideas, suggestions, concerns, or opinions about work-related issues with the intent to improve organizational or unit functioning (Morrison, 2011), is considered potentially risky (Liu et al, 2010).

To envisage

Great leaders across centuries and across institutions - political, social and economic - have astutely used the "power of imagery" in stirring a group of people. The power of envisaging an inspiring future and energizing the constituents towards realizing it seems indisputable. In an organizational context too, the implications of a "shared vision" has received considerable attention both on theoretical and practical fronts.

Social entrepreneurship: A distinctive domain?

Though 'social entrepreneurship' as a phenomenon that integrates economic and social value creation has had a long presence, it does not seem to have attracted wide scholarly attention. A review of the social science literature found despite spanning a period of nearly 20 years, just 152 journal articles on social entrepreneurship and 10 key areas of future research (Short, Moss and Lumpkin, 2009).

Leadership effectiveness

A cursory glance at the academic literature shows that the phenomenon of leadership has intrigued scholars across domains, particularly those from social psychological and organization behavioral disciplines. In fact, a Google Scholar search for the word "leadership" in the title of the article yields more than 150,000 results.

Institutions and Entrepreneurship

Douglass C North's essay on "Institutions", published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (Vol 5, Winter 1991), was a compulsory reading during my MBA days. But as many B-school students, I too graduated barely managing to flip through the many seminal essays such as this.

Maximizing organization performance

I have always been fascinated by the subject of how organizations, both for-profit and non-profit, manage their human resources to achieve greater organizational performance. Having worked in organizations of varied nature and settings, albeit for a shorter time, and having gotten time to reflect on these experiences, I believe that this area of maximizing organization performance offers tremendous scope for meaningful investigations.

Trust: Intra- and Inter- organizational

A few days back an interesting academic lecture titled "Sparks, Workers and Slugs: On the Relationship between Work Orientation and Trust among Firefighters" was delivered by Professor Michael G. Pratt. Based on a decade of research, his talk was essentially about exploring the relationship between work orientation and trust among firefighters. It was particularly intriguing to know how perceptions of work orientations get formed based on small social cues outside the work domain, and how this perception determines the degree of trust between workers.