Theorising determinants of employee voice: an integrative model across disciplines and levels of analysis

• Published date: 01 January 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12056
• Date: 01 January 2015

Theorising determinants of employee voice: an

integrative model across disciplines and levels of

analysis

Bruce E. Kaufman, Department of Economics, Georgia State University, and Centre

for Work, Organization and Wellbeing, Department of Employment Relations and

Human Resources, Griffith University

Human Resource Management Journal, Vol 25, no 1, 2015, pages 19–40

This article critiques organisational behaviour (OB) research on employee voice and presents a

broader-based conceptual model that integrates ideas and concepts across employment relationship

disciplines and levels of analysis. OB studies err by taking an overly individualistic, psychological,

managerialist and de-institutionalised perspective on employee voice. This criticism is documented and

illustrated with numerous examples from the OB literature. To provide a constructive step forward, the

article presents an enlarged model of employee voice that not only includes OB but also brings in

important contributions from the HRM, industrial relations, labour economics and labour process fields.

The model provides an integrative framework for theoretical and empirical studies of voice and yields a

number of research and practice implications.

Contact: Bruce E. Kaufman, Department of Economics, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA

30303, USA. Email: bkaufman@gsu.edu

Keywords: employee voice; HRM; employment relationship; organisational behaviour; indus-

trial relations

INTRODUCTION

The employee voice concept was popularised in the research literature by Freeman and

Medoff (1984), although its roots go back more than two centuries (Kaufman, 2014a). The

number of books and articles on employee voice began to mushroom 10 years later and

spread into industrial sociology, labour law and behavioural science fields, such as

industrial-organisational psychology, organisational behaviour (OB) and HRM. Illustratively,

symposia on employee voice have been featured in the Journal of Management Studies

(September 2003), Socio-Economic Review (May 2006), Human Relations (March 2010), Human

Resource Management (January 2011) and Industrial Relations (January 2013). Also recently

published is a 29-chapter Handbook of Research on Employee Voice (Wilkinson et al., 2014).

Naturally, researchers in these many different fields and disciplines explore the voice topic

from different frames of reference and with different concepts and methods. Also, the ongoing

trend towards academic specialisation both across and within fields tends to fragment the

research literature on employee voice into self-contained and self-referential silos (Wilkinson

and Fay, 2011) – referred to by Suddaby (2012), editor of the Academy of Management Review,as

the ‘balkanization of management theory’ (p. 7).

This article seeks to break down some of these employee voice silos and foster a more

integrative and cross-disciplinary research dialogue. No field is free of excessive specialisation

and narrowness of approach; however, the OB segment of the voice literature seems

particularly divorced from the historical mainstream of the subject and theories and findings

in other employment-related fields (Godard, 2014; Mowbray et al., 2014; Pohler and Luchak,

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doi: 10.1111/1748-8583.12056

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 25 NO 1, 2015 19

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Please cite this article in press as: Kaufman, B.E. (2015) ‘Theorising determinants of employee voice: an integrative model across disciplines and

levels of analysis’. Human Resource Management Journal 25: 1, 19–40.

2014). Hence, this article proceeds in a two-step process of critique and reformulation. The first

step is to outline the OB model of employee voice, using recent articles by Morrison (2011) and

Klaas et al. (2012) as a focal point, and identify its important shortcomings (also see Brinsfield,

2014). The second step is to take the OB perspective and build on it a more integrative and

broad-based voice model by incorporating key concepts and ideas from other fields, such as

HRM, industrial relations (IR), labour economics (LE) and the labour process (LP) part of

industrial sociology. These perspectives receive chapter-length treatment in the Wilkinson et al.

(2014) research handbook, and this article can be viewed as an attempt to formalise a greater

conceptual unity among them in the spirit of the original cross-disciplinary and multilevel

employment relations (ER) field (Edwards, 2003; Budd, 2004; Kaufman, 2004).

OB: CONCEPTUALISATION AND MODEL OF EMPLOYEE VOICE

The OB-centred literature on employee voice was recently summarised and synthesised in two

lengthy review articles in top-tier journals by Morrison (2011) and Klaas et al. (KOBW, 2012).1

Both articles are billed in their titles as integrative and include in their bibliographies more than

two hundred studies. These articles do not speak for all OB researchers; a search of the

literature can always find exceptions to the criticisms and generalisations made here, and the

two articles and literature they summarise may have a discernible American slant.

The place to start is the definition and conceptualisation of employee voice. Morrison (2011)

states, ‘I offer the following integrated conceptualization of voice: discretionary communication

of ideas, suggestions, concerns, or opinions about work-related issues with the intent to

improve organizational and unit functioning’ (p. 375). She also lists these specific features of

employee voice: verbal expression, individual choice, face-to-face, prosocial and constructive

intent. Her article focuses on psychological antecedents, processes and outcomes of voice at the

individual and small group levels, and excludes from coverage the voice literatures in

organisational justice, HRM and IR (LE is not mentioned) on the grounds that they ‘have not

considered discretionary voice behaviors, nor the causes or consequences of this behavior . . .

[but] a wide range of formal mechanisms’ (p. 381, emphasis in original).

Unexpectedly for a review article, KOBW do not provide a definition of the voice construct.

However, their perspective is also centred in micro OB, and in particular psychological

determinants and processes. For example, KOBW describe voice as a discretionary choice made

by the individual employee that typically consists of communicating ideas, opinions and

preferences upward to superiors in the organisation. They also observe that the dominant

assumption that voice is functional for the organisation (p. 337) brings benefits to managers

(p. 328) and takes a prosocial orientation (pp. 337–338). They cite seven determinants of voice

(p. 316), and these have a heavy micro OB orientation, such as trait-like individual differences,

satisfaction-commitment-loyalty and organisational culture. Unlike Morrison, however, KOBW

give some consideration to formal and collective forms of voice, and posit not only a prosocial

orientation but also a justice orientation rooted in dissatisfaction and potential conflict of

interests. This facet leads KOBW to briefly discuss grievance systems and mention collective

bargaining; they do not, however, specifically introduce HRM or IR into their integrative review

(LE is not mentioned).

Based on her review and synthesis of the micro organisational literature, Morrison depicts

in a diagram the core independent and dependent variables and causal orderings for a model

of employee voice. It is reproduced as Figure 1. KOBW do not present a diagram, but the

discussion in their article closely follows Figure 1.

Integrative model of employee voice

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© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.