How and When Managers Reward Employees’ Voice: The Role of Proactivity Attributions

Abstract

Recent voice research has noted that providing adequate job rewards for speaking up can sustainably motivate voice from employees. We examine why managers who seek out voice at work might not always properly reward the behavior. Drawing on theories of dispositional attribution, we propose that, in general, managers tend to reward voice because it signals to them that employees possess a valued underlying trait: proactivity, which is characterized by change-orientation and foresight. However, we argue that when managers engage in more voice solicitation—that is, explicitly ask for voice and take a listening posture toward it—their tendency to infer proactivity from employees’ voice weakens. Thus, we make a case that voice solicitation, a managerial behavior intended to set facilitating conditions for speaking up at work, inadvertently weakens the (indirect) relationship between employee voice and job rewards. We establish support for our theory in a set of 2 studies with complementary designs. Study 1 was a pre-registered between-subjects experiment that used a realistic vignette design with an online panel of 592 working adults based in the United States. Study 2 was a multisource field survey with a sample of 385 employees and their managers working at the India branch of a global technology company in the oil and gas industry. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our results.

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“…First, previous research has shown that leadership has an encouraging role in employee voices (Howard & Holmes, 2020;Park et al, 2022), but our research advances existing employee voice types by showing different leadership styles. Supported Hypothesis 1 states that leadership style plays a more critical role in determining the employee's voice on the job.…”

“…When leaders remove barriers to hierarchical communication (Lapointe and Vandenberghe, 2018), they create an organizational climate of trust and psychological safety where employees feel safe not only to share advice with colleagues, but more importantly to ask work-related questions (Weiss et al, 2018). Leader personality traits may have indirect effects, positive or negative, on members' voice and work engagement with workplace status (Carnevale et al, 2022;Park et al, 2022;Wang et al, 2022). Research has found that leaders' threats to judge employees' voices can lead to lower performance appraisals of employees (Weiss & Morrison, 2019;Xu et al, 2019), so employees may change their voiceover styles in line with their supervisors' perceptions of workplace behavior (Ng et al, 2022； Park et al, 2022.…”

“…Leaders play a major role in setting the direction and strategy of an organization by influencing and encouraging beneficial voices and deterring harmful voice actions through formal and informal means (Howard & Holmes, 2020;Park et al, 2022). Disruption by leaders and peers also hurts employee voice and has a positive effect on employee silence (Jung & Yoon, 2019;Knoll et al, 2021;Ng et al, 2022).…”

“…A promising way forward in this unprecedented situation is to encourage employees to speak out, thereby helping 2022). Thus, the voice may be characteristic of proactive behavior, but managers' perceived initiative in behavior may vary according to their level of vocal solicitation, suggesting that there may be greater awareness of other active behaviors among different types of managers differences (Martin &Harrison, 2022), and more importantly, supervisors' perceptions directly affect the degree to which employees are rewarded (Park et al, 2022;Wang et al, 2022).…”

“…Voice is a notable behavior because it represents dissent about the current state of work and often exposes issues to leaders (Park et al, 2022). The social cost of voice is prominent because it is arguably the most dangerous type of civic behavior, as others may dislike it or view it as destructive (Ng et al, 2022).…”