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Channels of employee voice: complementary or competing for space?
Author(s) -
McCloskey Christina,
McDonnell Anthony
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
industrial relations journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.525
H-Index - 3
eISSN - 1468-2338
pISSN - 0019-8692
DOI - 10.1111/irj.12209
Subject(s) - confusion , employee voice , neglect , rhetoric , context (archaeology) , complement (music) , space (punctuation) , business , psychology , cognitive psychology , social psychology , computer science , linguistics , paleontology , philosophy , biochemistry , chemistry , psychiatry , complementation , gene , psychoanalysis , biology , phenotype , operating system
This article identifies the existence of employee voice channels and examines how they interact within the context of an overall organisational voice system. In so doing, we can better appreciate the disparities between the micro‐level reality and macro‐level rhetoric of employee voice for highly skilled employees in the knowledge intensive sector. Drawing on an instrumental, inductive case study involving managers and, most notably, employees, the research finds that the plurality of mechanisms provided for voice appears to cause some confusion that leads to a neglect of certain channels and others competing for attention. This raises the issue, which has not received attention thus far, as to whether the availability of multiple voice channels can have counter‐productive effects whereby they start to compete with rather than complement each other.