Do social media enhance constructive employee voice all of the time or just some of the time?

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12081
• Author: Emma Parry,Paul Flowers,Graeme Martin
• Date: 01 November 2015
• Published date: 01 November 2015

Do social media enhance constructive employee

voice all of the time or just some of the time?

Graeme Martin, University of Dundee

Emma Parry and Paul Flowers, Cranfield School of Management

Human Resource Management Journal, Vol 25, no 4, 2015, pages 541–562

Social media are becoming widely adopted by organisations to encourage collaboration and communication.

We seek to understand how social media can enhance employee voice and employees’ willingness to engage

in constructive dialogue with both colleagues and managers. By drawing on literature on employee voice,

signalling theory and personal control to analyse qualitative data from researchinto three strategic business

units in a major global telecommunications corporation, we find that (a) employee perceptions of personal

control and autonomy influence whether and how employees’ exercise voice through social media, and (b)

these perceptions vary according to different organisational/field-level contexts evident in the corporation.

Contact: Dr Emma Parry, Reader in Human Resource Management, Cranfield School of

Management, Bedford MK43 0AL, UK. Email: emma.parry@cranfield.ac.uk

Keywords: social media; employee voice; e-HRM; communication

INTRODUCTION

Powerful social media, including online blogs,1microblogging,2social networking sites,3

wikis,4media sharing sites and gaming technologies, have become increasingly

accessible through mobile technology (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). These media are

being widely adopted by the HR function in e-HR, talent management, communications, and

learning and knowledge management strategies (Martin et al., 2009; Kristl Davison et al., 2011;

London and Hall, 2011; Reddington and Francis, 2011). In doing so, the function seeks to

transform its contribution to the economic and social aims of organisations (Martin et al., 2008;

Marler, 2009; Parry and Solidaro, 2013; Bissola and Imperatori, 2014). The case for this is

typically articulated as (a) encouraging collaboration and engagement among employees,

customers, suppliers and partners, (b) sharing knowledge to create organisational learning, (c)

helping organisations communicate with a new (virtual)-generation of employees who have

grown up with such media, (d) helping organisations, employees and potential employees learn

more about each other, and (e) giving customers, business partners and employees more

opportunity to exercise ‘voice’ on key issues (Lai and Turban, 2008; Martin et al., 2009).

Such promises rest on three, essentially managerialist, arguments for enhancing employee

voice (Fox, 1985; Budd and Bhave, 2008). First, managers can use such media to encourage

individuals to exercise direct voice rather than collective voice through union channels (Bryson

et al., 2006), as social media are open to all employees with access to the Internet. Second,

employers wish employees to engage directly in dialogue with managers, to share information

with colleagues, and in some situations participate in decision-making (Martin et al., 2009).

Third, employee voice is a potential alternative to employee exit, so may help arrest

organisational decline (Hirschman, 1970; Batt et al., 2002). Thus, for example, IBM, a leading

user and marketer of social media solutions, claims to have involved more than 300,000

employees since 2001 in its well-publicised ‘Jams’, which are essentially online brainstorming

and problem-solving sessions.

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doi: 10.1111/1748-8583.12081

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 25 NO 4, 2015 541

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Please cite this article in press as: Martin, G., Parry, E. and Flowers, P. (2015) ‘Do social media enhance constructive employee voice all of the time

or just some of the time?’. Human Resource Management Journal 25: 4, 541–562.

Yet, despite the growing HR interest in social media, there is little academic evidence to

support these claims for their impact on voice (Klass et al., 2012), perhaps because of their

uncritical managerialist assumptions. This gap gives rise to our research question: how, and in

what circumstances, can social media be used to enhance employee voice and employees’

willingness to engage in constructive dialogue in their organisations? By constructive dialogue,

we refer to dialogical interactions through which actors seek to cooperate with one another

rather than dialectical interactions through which opposition between actors is reinforced

(MacIntosh et al., 2012). To answer this question, we integrate insights from signalling theory in

HR and the effect of personal control felt by employees on their willingness to exercise voice and

their perceptions of social media as a means of helping them do so (Tangirala and Ramanujam,

2008; Martin and Groen-in’t Woud, 2011). This integration allows us to develop four

subquestions concerning the influence of exogenous and endogenous contexts on the voice

outcomes of the implementation of social media in practice.

To address these, we use in-depth interview data from a within-case comparison of three

strategic business units (SBUs) within a large global telecommunications company. These data

highlight the importance of leadership signals regarding social media as a precondition for

socially constructive employee voice and the importance of key exogenous and endogenous

influences in how they are read. Our contributions to the HR literature on social media

and employee voice are the following: (1) to develop earlier theory by linking signalling theory

to personal control, employee voice and engagement (Brockner et al., 2004; Tangirala and

Ramanujam, 2008; Morrison, 2011), and (2) to show how social media use is embedded in key

internal and external contexts in organisations.

Employee voice, signalling theory and personal control as influences on the potential

use of social media in organisations

Most research on employee voice is an extension of Hirschman’s (1970) work, which saw voice

as a human tendency to express discontent by generally ‘kicking up a fuss’ (p. 30). Thus, Budd

(2014: 477) sees employee voice as expressing opinions and having meaningful input into

work-related decision-making’, which includes ‘individual and collective voice, union and

non-union voice, and voice mechanisms that cover not only employment terms, but also work

autonomy and business issues. As such it is concerned with (a) whether to ‘speak up’ or remain

silent (Rees et al., 2013), (b) whether voice is exercised in a socially constructive manner to

improve decision-making (Tangirala and Ramanujam, 2008) or as a form of retributive justice

(Klass et al., 2012), and (c) the extent to which employees enjoy democratic rights in their

organisations and are able to exercise control or task autonomy in their work situations

(Wilkinson and Fay, 2011). There is a considerable literature on these topics (Morrison,

2011), particularly concerning employees’ motivations to express voice, and the situational

factors that determine individual behaviour (Klass et al., 2012). Outside of the US industrial and

organisational psychology-dominated literature, however, which sees employee voice as an

opportunity to serve organisational interests, voice is usually explored as a collective

phenomenon, linked to employee participation in decision-making and offering the potential to

challenge management (Bryson et al., 2006; Budd et al., 2010; Wilkinson and Fay, 2011; Barry and

Wilkinson, 2015). Unfortunately, individual and collective levels of analysis are rarely combined

because of the different axiological and methodological inclinations of researchers concerning

practical relevance (Nicolai and Seidl, 2010; Barry and Wilkinson, 2015). So, in this article, we

combine them to explain the potential relationship between social media and employee voice

at the individual and collective levels, and to set out some further lines of enquiry for research

on this topic.

Social media and employee voice

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 25 NO 4, 2015542

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.