Employee Participation and Voice

Employee voice can be defined broadly as the process of speaking out in an effort to influence organizational decision making or in response to perceived organizational injustices. Today’s conceptualization of voice has been influenced by research from a variety of disciplines, including economics, political science, and, more recently, human resource management (HRM) and organizational behavior (OB). Research from these disciplines reveals that voice can be enacted by a number of players at the individual and the collective levels (e.g., individual employees, trade unions), that it can take several different forms within an organization’s structure through both formal and informal communication channels (e.g., attitude surveys, open-door policies), and that it is associated with a host of meaningful outcomes for both employees and organizations (e.g., job satisfaction, ...