Speaking up and moving up: How voice can enhance employees' social status

• Author: Mona Weiss,Elizabeth W. Morrison
• Published date: 01 January 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2262
• Date: 01 January 2019

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Speaking up and moving up: How voice can enhance

employees'social status

Mona Weiss |Elizabeth W. Morrison

Department of Management & Organizations,

New York University, New York, New York,

USA

Correspondence

Mona Weiss, Department of Management &

Organizations, New York University, Leonard

N. Stern School of Business, Kaufman

Management Center, 44 West Fourth Street,

New York, New York 10012, USA.

Email: mweiss@stern.nyu.edu

Funding information

Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung

der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung, Grant/

Award Number: P2EZP1_159082; Swiss

National Research Foundation, Grant/Award

Number: P2EZP1_159082

Summary

A central argument in the literature on employee voice is that speaking up at work carries image

risk. Challenging this assumption, we propose that voice can in fact positively affect how

employees are viewed by others, thereby enhancing their social status. Using theory on status

attainment and the fundamental social perception dimensions of agency and communion, we

suggest that employee voice will result in higher status evaluations by increasing the extent to

which an employee is judged as confident/competent (agency) and other‐oriented/helpful

(communion). We conducted a survey study and two experiments to test these hypotheses.

The results supported our predictions. Employees who voiced were ascribed higher status than

those who did not, and this effect was mediated by judgments of agency (in all three studies)

and communion (in two studies). These results highlight the implications of voice behavior for

status enhancement within organizations.

KEYWORDS

agency and communion, employee voice, proactive behavior, socialstatus

1|INTRODUCTION

Being proactive means taking control to make things happen (Parker,

Bindl, & Strauss, 2010), and one of the most important ways in which

employees can be proactive at work is by engaging in voice:

constructively challenging the status quo by raising suggestions,

concerns, or opinions on workplace or organizational issues

(Morrison, 2014). A central argument throughout the voice literature

is that employee voice is critical for organizational effectiveness, pro-

viding a mechanism for innovation, learning, and error prevention/

correction (Morrison, 2014). Yet despite the value of employee voice

for organizational performance, employees often fail to speak up with

valuable ideas or important concerns. A key reason for this failure to

speak up is fear of negative social consequences: Specifically, the fear

that supervisors and co‐workers will respond negatively and thus

form a less favorable impression of the employee (Detert & Burris,

2007; Detert & Trevino, 2010; Grant, 2013; Milliken, Morrison, &

Hewlin, 2003).

Interestingly, as noted in two recent papers (Burris, 2012; Whiting,

Maynes, Podsakoff, & Podsakoff, 2012), research on how supervisors

and peers actually respond to voice has been quite limited; there has

not been a unified theoretical framework for explaining these

responses, and the results from the few studies that have been done

have been mixed. Moreover, the main focus of these studies has been

on how voice affects performance evaluations and not other aspects

of social judgment (Burris, 2012; Van Dyne & LePine, 1998; Whiting

et al., 2012; Whiting, Podsakoff, & Pierce, 2008). As a result, we lack

systematic, theory‐based understanding of the individual‐level effects

of voice behavior, and the question of how voice affects impressions

of the employee is still unclear. This is the gap that we seek to fill in this

research.

Specifically, our focus is on the effects of voice on evaluations of

the employee's social status. By social status, we mean the amount

of prestige, respect, and esteem that one has in the eyes of others

(Anderson, John, Keltner, & Kring, 2001; Blader & Chen, 2012; Fiske,

2010; Ridgeway, 2001). Specifically, we are interested in examining

whether individuals who engage in voice are held in higher regard for

their contribution to the group and/or organization, or as often feared

by employees (Detert & Edmondson, 2011; Milliken et al., 2003),

viewed more negatively for challenging the views of others or how

things are currently being done. We focus on social status as it is one

of the most fundamental aspects of social relations, with a large body

of research demonstrating that it has important career‐and health‐

related consequences for individuals (Adler, Epel, Castellazzo, &

Ickovics, 2000; Magee & Galinsky, 2008; Singh‐Manoux, Marmot, &

Adler, 2005). Given these far‐reaching implications, it is important to

Received: 5 December 2016 Revised: 5 December 2017 Accepted: 13 December 2017

DOI: 10.1002/job.2262

J Organ Behav. 2019;40:5–19. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job 5