This article reports meta‐analyses intended to clarify and enhance our understanding of voice and its promotive and prohibitive forms. We find that undifferentiated constructive voice is associated with a wide range of antecedents that fit in Morrison's (2014) five categories: (a) dispositions, (b) job and organizational attitudes and perceptions, (c) emotions, beliefs, and schemas, (d) supervisor and leader behavior, and (e) contextual factors. However, relative weight analyses reveal a highly dominant variable within each category (personal initiative, felt responsibility, engagement, leader–member exchange, and positive workplace climate). We also find that undifferentiated constructive voice has a moderate zero‐order association with job performance that is nonsignificant when task performance and organizational citizenship behavior are also considered. Finally, we explore how associations vary as a function of whether voice is promotive or prohibitive. First, there are significant differences in associations with over a third of the antecedents (core self‐evaluations, felt responsibility, organizational commitment, detachment, psychological safety, ethical leadership, and leader openness). Second, although promotive voice has a positive association with job performance, the opposite is true for prohibitive voice. We conclude with suggestions to enhance our understanding of voice, especially with respect to efforts needed to clarify and distinguish promotive and prohibitive voice.

SummaryEmpowerment offers the predominant explanation for why employee perceptions of high‐performance managerial practices are positively associated with employee job performance. Drawing on social cognitive theory, we propose that high‐performance managerial practices also influence performance because these practices encourage employees to engage in voice. Additionally, we suggest that empowerment and voice together provide a more complete explanation for why high‐performance managerial practices and job performance are linked. In essence, we argue that empowerment transmits the effects of high‐performance managerial practices to job performance because it engenders voice. Using meta‐analysis of primary research consisting of 151 independent samples involving 53,200 employees, we find that not only do empowerment and voice independently transmit the effects of high‐performance managerial practices to job performance, but they sequentially mediate this relationship as well. Further, we distinguish among skill‐enhancing, motivation‐enhancing, and opportunity‐enhancing high‐performance managerial practices to identify when empowerment and voice are more or less effective in explaining associations with job performance. Although empowerment and voice transmit effects of all 3 types of high‐performance managerial practices to employee performance, these mechanisms appear to provide the best explanation for the effects of opportunity‐enhancing practices, and the primary reason why is because employees respond to opportunity‐enhancing practices with voice.

Employee voice, or speaking up with constructive expressions in the workplace, is beneficial to organizations as it is often a catalyst for positive change. Despite its benefits, voice may have mixed implications for supervisors who are frequently the targets of group members’ ideas or concerns. We draw on the transactional theory of stress to examine the positive and negative effects of group promotive and prohibitive voice on supervisor emotional exhaustion and performance. Specifically, we theorize and find that supervisors appraise group promotive voice as fostering their well-being and personal growth (i.e., challenge appraisal) and, conversely, appraise group prohibitive voice as inhibiting their well-being and personal growth (i.e., hindrance appraisal). These appraisals, in turn, influence supervisors’ emotional exhaustion and performance. Furthermore, we investigate a supervisor’s personal sense of power as a boundary condition that influences the effects of group voice on supervisor appraisals of group voice and subsequent emotional exhaustion and performance. We test our model using a multiwave field sample design (Study 1) and an in-person experimental design (Study 2). Across these 2 studies, we find negative indirect effects of group promotive voice on supervisor emotional exhaustion through challenge appraisals of group voice and positive indirect effects of group prohibitive voice on supervisor emotional exhaustion through hindrance appraisals of group voice as well as conditional indirect effects of supervisors’ personal sense of power. Our model offers novel insights into supervisors’ appraisals of group voice and the implications for their emotional exhaustion and performance.

We consider the utility of two contrasting theoretical perspectives in explaining how laissez-faire formal leaders and team member motivation to lead (MTL) influences informal leadership and team task performance. The first perspective, functional leadership theory, is the dominant lens used currently to understand informal leadership.However, we suggest that social learning theory offers a compelling alternative account. In a multiwave survey study of 344 members of 72 work teams, we find support for the social learning theory predictions that laissez-faire formal leaders are perceived by team members to engage in less modeling of effective leadership and as a result are negatively associated with informal leadership and team task performance. We do not find support for the functional leadership theory predictions that laissez-faire formal leaders are positively associated with team members' informal leadership and team task performance, which would be due to an increased perceived need for leadership. The social learning effects are stronger for teams that are lower in member MTL and weaker for teams that are higher in member MTL. These results suggest social learning theory may be preferable to functional leadership theory for understanding informal leadership in teams.

Engagement is widely viewed as a motivational state that captures the degree to which individuals apply their physical, cognitive, and emotional energies to their jobs, and ultimately improves job performance. However, this job-level view overlooks the possibility that engagement may vary across the different tasks within a job and that engagement in one task may influence engagement and performance in a subsequent task. In this article, we develop and test hypotheses based on a task-level view of engagement and the general notion that there is "residual engagement" from a task that carries forward to a subsequent task. We propose that although task engagement (engagement in a specific task that comprises a broader role) positively spills over to influence task engagement and performance in a subsequent task, in part because of the transmission of positive affect, task engagement simultaneously engenders attention residue, which in turn impedes subsequent task engagement and performance. These predictions were supported in a study of 477 task transitions made by 20 crew members aboard The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Human Exploration Research Analog (Study 1) and in a laboratory study of 346 participants who transitioned between a firefighting task and an assembly task (Study 2). Our investigation explains how engagement flows across tasks, illuminates a negative implication of engagement that has been masked by the predominant job-level perspective, and identifies completeness as a task attribute that reduces this negative consequence of engagement.