When to speak up at work: a review of employee voice and silence behavior using a prospect approach

ABSTRACT

Communication is ubiquitous in organizations. Employees cooperate to accomplish job tasks through communication and thus need to continuously make decisions of whether they should speak up or withhold potentially beneficial ideas, suggestions, and concerns. In this paper, I propose that the prospect theory can be a useful theoretical framework to predict employee voice behaviors in organizations. Specifically, I argue that in the editing phase, employees set up their reference points and tease out irrelevant outcomes; in the evaluating phase, employees evaluate the anticipated outcomes as gains or losses. Furthermore, self-construal and organizational commitment interact to allow a salient decision level to emerge in the comprehensive evaluating phase. Theoretical implications and future research directions are discussed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.