Say it as it is: Consequences of voice directness, voice politeness, and voicer credibility on voice endorsement.

Abstract

To gain endorsement from their managers, should employees be direct with explicit change suggestions, or should they be indirect with questions and hints? We draw on psychological threat and communication clarity theories to offer competing hypotheses with respect to the association between voice directness and managerial endorsement. We then further draw from social judgment research to theorize whether the relationship between voice directness and managerial endorsement might be modified by voicer politeness and voicer credibility. The results of an experimental study and two field studies show that being direct about change-oriented suggestions is associated with more frequent managerial endorsement when voicers are credible (Studies 1 and 2 in the United States) or polite (Study 3 in China). We discuss implications of these findings, limitations, and directions for future research.

What’s in a word? Using construal-level theory to predict voice endorsement

“…Whereas recent work has started to move beyond main effects towards interactive effects of message, sender, context, and receiver attributes on voice endorsement (e.g. Lam et al, 2018;Sijbom et al, 2015b;Urbach & Fay, 2018), we propose that our construal-level approach can further advance this emerging area of investigation by offering a unifying principle to guide studies examining different components of voice communication (see Lee, 2019). Although this construal-level approach is not all-encompassing (see below), it nevertheless can encompass many instantiations of message factors (e.g.…”

“…The theory's two central conceptsmessage framing and psychological distancecan be operationalized in myriad ways (Davidson & Van Dyne, 2017). For example, the theory's distinction between high and low construal levels may give rise to new voice typologies, such as polite versus colloquial voice, indirect versus direct voice (see Lam et al, 2018), desirability-focused versus feasibility-focused voice, and idealistic versus pragmatic voice. Similarly, accounting for psychological distance in voice endorsement should be increasingly relevant in today's workplace where managers are leading diverse employees (conducive to variability in social distance) in a global workplace (conducive to variability in spatial distance).…”

“…For example, motivational predictors such as supervisor's power motive (Urbach & Fay, 2018) or supervisor's achievement goals (Sijbom et al, 2015b) have been shown to influence voice endorsement in interaction with other variables, yet these motivational variables cannot readily map onto the proposed message framing and relational context factors in our construal-level theory approach. As another example, whereas Lam et al (2018) examined voice politenesswhich can theoretically map onto message framing at a high/low level of construalthe authors employed voice politeness as a proxy for warmth and let it vary from polite to rude, rather than from polite to colloquial (i.e., high/low construal level), thereby inhibiting correspondence to construal-level theory. Their newly introduced voice directness dimension may however have more potential for integration within a construal-level theory framework as one may imagine that more direct voice tends to reflect a more low-level construal, whereas indirect voice may reflect a high construal-level (Davidson & Van Dyne, 2017).…”

A Sociopolitical Perspective to Understand When and Why Supervisors Endorse and Implement Employees’ Suggested Changes

“…In a recent study (Lam, Lee, & Sui, 2018), researchers have observed that supervisors are more likely to endorse employees' suggestions when employees are more credible and polite.…”

“…Only a few studies examined the outcomes of employee voice behavior (e.g., Howell et al, 2015). Among the studies examining the outcomes of voice behavior, even fewer studies examined supervisor voice endorsement and voice implementation (Burris, 2012;Howell et al, 2015;Lam et al, 2018).…”