Abstract
This article examines how people working in organizational hierarchies wrestle
with the challenge of upward voice. To understand how individuals think about
speaking up at work, we first undertook in-depth exploratory research in a
knowledge-intensive multinational corporation in which employee input was
considered crucial. Qualitative data collected in 190 interviews with employees
from all levels and functions suggest that fear of speaking up, even with
pro-organizational suggestions, is pervasive and, for many, a source of intense
negative affect. A second study used scenarios about speaking up to deepen and
extend these findings. Quantitative and qualitative survey data were collected
from 71 individuals in MBA and Executive MBA programs who had worked in a range
of organizational settings. Overall, our analyses demonstrate that influences on
the decision to speak up include both stable and situation-specific factors,
such that conceptualizing improvement-oriented voice as an event-level
phenomenon may advance theory on this important workplace behavior. Findings
also suggest a profoundly assymetrical relation between the intrapersonal
motivations for and against speaking up, leading to a novel theoretical
explanation for the prevalence of silence.