Employees’ dissenting voices via testimonials and their impact on corporate hypocrisy perception and reputational damage via narrative transportation

ABSTRACT

Rumors of a toxic workplace can create a negative organizational reputation among external stakeholders. Based on the theoretical framework of narrative transportation, the current study tests how exposure to employees’ dissenting testimonials of the workplace might increase hypocrisy perception and negatively influence organizational reputation via the experience of transportation. A classic experiment design with a control group tests the between-subjects and within-subject effects of employees’ dissenting voices on study variables. The results support the influences of employees’ dissenting testimonials on transportation, perception of organizational hypocrisy, and damage to organizational reputation on both moral/affective and ability dimensions. Additionally, this study finds that the level of transportation differently influenced assessments of organizational reputation, suggesting a spillover effect on the ability dimension by moral transgressions.

KEYWORDS:

• Employee communication behaviors: employees’ dissenting voice
• employee testimonials
• narrative transportation
• negative megaphoning
• organizational hypocrisy
• organizational reputation
• reputational damage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For instance, the 2017 RAND corporation’s survey of 3,000 American workers from the American Life Panel reports that nearly one in five Americans think their workplace is socially hostile or threatening (Fortune, 2017). Another report, Preventing Toxic Workplaces by HR.com (2019), found that 54% of the surveyed human resources managers agree that negative work and relationship stressors are prevalent in their workplaces.

2. Whistleblowing occurs when employees turn to effectual non-organizational actors to bring attention or public scrutiny, and consequently legal actions, to organizational practices (Kassing, 1998). Usually reserved as a last resort, employees generally do not engage in whistleblowing unless they are particularly committed to rectifying the problem, due to substantial personal risks associated with the act of whistleblowing.

3. In the past, venues through which employees could vent their dissatisfaction had been typically limited to informal channels, such as corporate gossip or water-cooler conversations, and internal communication channels, which are put in place and monitored by the organization (Miles & Mangold, 2014). However, in today’s society, the communication boundaries between employees and external audiences have become significantly blurred due to the prevalence of internet discussion boards, such as Reddit and Quora, and video sharing sites, such as YouTube, where both insiders and outsiders come together to share their organizational experiences and opinions in the form of posts or comments (; Lee & Kim, 2020). Hence, the outreach of displaced dissent has expanded exponentially, along with its damaging effects on organizational reputation and external stakeholders’ attitudes toward the organization.

4. Emotional appeal represents how people feel toward a company, while the products/services dimension represents the excellent quality, innovativeness, and representation of a good value related to the company’s products and services. The vision and leadership dimension represents a company’s ability to set forth and follow clear and future-oriented visions with effective leadership, while workplace environment represents the soundness of a company’s work culture by providing a suitable environment for employees in attracting and retaining top talent. Social and environmental responsibility represents a company’s philanthropic efforts, while financial performance represents a company’s fiscal soundness with solid prospects for future growth.

5. Participants were selected from the Mechanical Turk worker panel of the general U.S. adult population. $3 was offered to incentivize the approximately 7-minute participation, and debriefing was provided after participants completed the study.

6. The minimum sample size for the study was calculated at 300 by G*Power 3.1 Analysis, A priori analysis (effect size d: .25 for the most reasonably conservative estimates; alpha error probability at .05; power level at .9; the number of groups at 2; the number of measurements at 8) (cf., Bruin, 2006)