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.

Team membership in today’s open talent economy is more fluid and interchangeable than ever before. In light of these dynamics, we consider how team members’ signaling of human and social capital, in the form of challenging or supportive voice, informs our understanding of how individuals across an organizational network self-assemble into temporary work teams. We test our hypotheses in two separate multiwave studies and find support for our hypotheses above and beyond the effects of homophily. In Study 1, we find support for a human capital pathway in which challenging voice in a team fosters perceptions of quality work that enhance one’s personal reputation in the broader network. Personal reputation, in turn, predicts team assembly decisions. In Study 2, we consider a social capital pathway alongside the human capital pathway. We find that supportive voice in a team fosters friendship that enhances the extent to which one is trusted in the broader network, and trust subsequently influences team assembly decisions. Potential team members appear to prioritize the social capital signaled by supportive voice more so than the human capital signaled by challenging voice, although those who possess both human and social capital are also highly sought during team formation. We discuss the implications of these findings for the literatures on voice and team assembly.

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