Keeping It Quiet? The Micro-Politics of Employee Voice in Company Strategic Decision-Making

Abstract

Employee voice in company strategic and governance decision-making in Anglophone countries commonly has few formal channels. This article’s investigation of labour’s (collective employees) interest expression in Australia and New Zealand finds that labour actors engage with company actors to craft a range of channels of expression and participation. In addition to actors’ utilisation of formal institutional provisions for adversarial collective bargaining and cooperative participation, actors utilise other ‘at the table’ arrangements that are typically of low salience. These include non-formal, inter-actor arrangements that facilitate contribution to decisions that can include matters of strategic importance. Labour actors engage with company actors in intricate micro-political relations to contribute influence in framing understandings and horizons of decisions and norm-building. Their quiet activities contribute regulatory effect in company decision-making.

Capturing the missing voices: A ‘fair go’ for sexual and gender minority employees in Australian workplaces

“…The subsequent ‘employee voice’ was primarily linked to the role of trade unions in expressing employees’ collective voice via industrial relations (Budd, 2014). Later, with the diminishing role of unions and the rising demand for employee voice as a corporate initiative, human resource (HR) management influenced a variety of voice mechanism (Casey and Delaney, 2022; Kaufman, 2015). Morrison (2014: 174) subsequently defined employee voice as ‘informal and discretionary communication by an employee of ideas, suggestions, concerns, information about problems, or opinions about work-related issues to persons who might be able to take appropriate action, with the intent to bring about improvement or change’; targeted recipients can include organizational hierarchy, supervisors, teammates or external parties.…”

Temporary Employment, Employee Representation, and Employer-Paid Training: A Comparative Analysis

“…This article considers the impact of employee representation (i) at the individual level, measured by access to representatives of a trade union or a work council at the workplace; and (ii) at the country level, measured by union coverage (Visser, 2003). Casey and Delaney (2021) highlight the need to distinguishing between how unions operate at these different levels: (i) by participating in individual negotiations in the workplace, and (ii) by involvement in the political dialogue at the country level. This distinction has not been theorized or empirically implemented in research on training.…”