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Tactics of speaking up: The roles of issue importance, perceived managerial openness, and managers' positive mood
Author(s) -
Xu Erica,
Huang Xu,
Ouyang Kan,
Liu Wu,
Hu Saiquan
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
human resource management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.888
H-Index - 94
eISSN - 1099-050X
pISSN - 0090-4848
DOI - 10.1002/hrm.21992
Subject(s) - employee voice , openness to experience , voice , extant taxon , mood , public relations , business , psychology , public sector , marketing , social psychology , political science , linguistics , philosophy , evolutionary biology , law , biology
Extant voice research has focused mainly on the conditions under which employees speak up, but we have limited knowledge about how employees speak up. This study examines voice tactics or the various ways in which employees express concerns to or share suggestions with their managers. Based on the notion that voice is a deliberative behavior, we draw upon a cost–benefit framework and propose that voice tactics are influenced by messages' characteristics and managers' stable and temporal characteristics. Specifically, we examine the joint effects of issue importance, perceived managerial openness, and managers' positive mood on employees' public (vs. private) and formal (vs. informal) voice tactics. Across two independent studies, our findings demonstrate that employees tend to use public channels and formal procedures only when three conditions are met simultaneously: (a) the issue is important, (b) managers are perceived as being open to employees' voice, and (c) managers are in a positive mood at the time of voicing. In addition, we found that speaking up via public channels or formal procedures is positively related to the success of voice.