Eintrag in der Universitätsbibliographie der TU Chemnitz
Volltext zugänglich unter
URN: urn:nbn:de:bsz:ch1-qucosa2-945989
Dilba, Dominik
Meyer, Bertolt (Prof. Dr.) ; Zill, Alexander (Prof. Dr.) (Gutachter)
An Event-Level Perspective on the Decision Between Employee Voice and Silence and Its Employee-Related Consequences
Eine ereignisbasierte Perspektive auf die Entscheidungsfindung zwischen Mitarbeiterschweigen und Voice sowie deren Konsequenzen auf Beschäftigte
Kurzfassung in englisch
Employee voice and silence refer to sharing vs. withholding organizationally relevant input at work. On the one hand, the efficient flow of information in the form of new ideas and suggestions, but also insights about inefficacies, conflicts, incompetence or injustice, are central for organizations to make decisions, implement changes, and improve functioning. On the other hand, speaking up about issues is a primary option for individual employees to shape and improve their own working conditions and environment. Despite these potential benefits on both levels, employees frequently prefer to hold back their thoughts, e.g. due to resignation about the lack of responses following earlier attempts to speak up, or due to fear of negative consequences like embarrassment, retaliation, or social exclusion for sharing criticism or diverging opinions. The two overarching questions within voice and silence research concern the emergence of voice and silence, and their consequences for employees and organizations. Studies set in real organizations often rely on measures of employees’ general tendencies of voice and silence behavior across many situations when trying to answer these questions (person-level studies), which results in several conceptual and methodological weaknesses. In Chapter 1, I describe these weaknesses of person-level voice and silence studies: By definition, voice and silence require relevant input that could be shared or withheld, but person-level studies rarely measure whether employees actually had relevant input to share. Drawing on Event System Theory, I propose to tie voice and silence to preceding workplace events that provide new input or make already present issues salient again so that employees start to consider speaking up or remaining silent. Studying individual events as the smallest building block for voice and silence research ensures that input was present, and avoids aggregating important details about very different situations into a general tendency of behavior. Chapter 2 supports these theoretical and conceptual thrusts empirically by examining two of the few existing datasets about person-level employee silence that also measured the presence of preceding events. Here, events to remain silent about were quite rare and could not be taken for granted. Furthermore, employees answered questions about silence behavior despite stating that they encountered no issues to remain silent about, highlighting the ambiguity of person-level studies and measures. Lastly, I demonstrated the confounding nature of the events that precede voice and silence -- if employees were exposed to e.g. inefficacies, conflicts or injustice, it is unclear if silence-outcome relations reflect the effects of these preceding events or the effects of remaining silent about them (or both). Two studies (an analysis of employee survey data from a German utility company and a simulation) highlight that this confounding influence biases the silence-outcome relationship upwards, marking existing findings about the consequences of voice and silence from person-level studies without control for event effects as potentially unreliable. Chapter 3 builds on these insights to establish the foundation for an event-level perspective on voice and silence. Behaviorally, I defined voice and silence as a continuum of shared information in reaction to a workplace event, and also added the cognitive aspect of feeling torn between speaking up vs. remaining silent. Then, I extended an existing expected-utility-based decision-making framework to incorporate a large number of known predictors of voice and silence in the form of event-related subjective expectancies and values. In two studies (a vignette study and an examination of actual recalled events), I demonstrated that the intention to speak and the amount of shared information after an event can be explained partially by the expected utility of voice and silence across multiple dimensions like the chance of success, or fear of negative consequences. Furthermore, the experienced conflict between voice and silence was related to an unclear intention to speak up. In Chapter 4, I examined the consequences of voice and silence from an event-based perspective. Drawing on Event System Theory and various theories about e.g. strain, affect, and sense-making or impression formation, I postulated different forms of event-induced outcome trajectories (temporary changes in dynamic, state-like outcomes like affect or strain vs. relatively stable changes of evaluative outcomes like perceived organizational justice or relationship quality). Voice and silence were posited to modulate these trajectories over time, e.g. due to feeling an inherently aversive conflict between voice and silence, or due to continued rumination about withheld information. In two studies where participants drew trajectories in an app I developed to describe changes in outcomes, results were variable and nuanced. The experienced conflict between voice and silence had the most consistent associations with outcomes like increased exhaustion or negative affect, whereas sharing more or less information following the event was rarely related to either strain and affect or to evaluative outcomes like organizational justice perceptions. I brought all these findings together in Chapter 5 and discussed their implications for voice and silence research, and the impact for practitioners as well. In sum, person-level examinations of voice and silence require better control strategies to ensure that employees actually have relevant input to share, and to control for the independent effects of events. Despite being a much more extensive change, I also argue in favor of switching the basic level of analysis and theorizing to individual events. In this way, the relationship between voice and silence can be defined more clearly, situational characteristics and variability can be included when studying the emergence of voice and silence, and the complex interplay of event effects and voice/silence-related mechanisms can be disentangled when studying the outcomes of voice and silence. Further research is needed to clarify the relative importance of event effects and voice/silence mechanisms, and therefore where practitioners should begin when implementing interventions.
| Universität: | Technische Universität Chemnitz | |
| Institut: | Professur Arbeits-, Organisations- und Wirtschaftspsychologie | |
| Fakultät: | Fakultät für Human- und Sozialwissenschaften | |
| Dokumentart: | Dissertation | |
| Betreuer: | Meyer, Bertolt (Prof. Dr.) | |
| URL/URN: | https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:ch1-qucosa2-945989 | |
| SWD-Schlagwörter: | Organisationspsychologie , Arbeitnehmer , Entscheidungsfindung | |
| Freie Schlagwörter (Englisch): | employee voice , employee silence , event perspective , decision-making , trajectory analysis | |
| DDC-Sachgruppe: | Psychologie, Angewandte Psychologie | |
| Sprache: | englisch | |
| Tag der mündlichen Prüfung | 18.11.2024 | |
| OA-Lizenz | CC BY 4.0 |
