This paper contributes to research on the outcomes of employee prosocial voice to managers by focusing on the relationships between voice and two managerially controlled outcomes: managerial performance ratings and involuntary turnover. Past research has considered voice from either the managerial or subordinate perspective individually and found that it can lead to positive outcomes because of its improvement-oriented nature. However, others have argued that voice can lead to unfavorable outcomes for employees. To begin resolving these competing perspectives, we examine agreement and disagreement between employees and their managers on the extent to which employees provide upward voice, proposing and demonstrating that considering either perspective alone does not fully capture how voice is related to employee outcomes. Findings from a study of 7,578 subordinates and their 335 general managers within a national restaurant chain indicate that agreement between employees and managers that employees display a high level of voice leads to favorable outcomes for employees. Our findings then extend existing research by showing that supervisor–subordinate disagreement around voice also helps explain employee outcomes—namely, how negative outcomes arise as a result of employees overestimating their voice relative to their managers' perspective and how positive outcomes result when employees underestimate their upward voice.

How employees communicate their ideas at work shapes how their ideas are received. When employees constructively communicate their ideas, the value of those ideas can be more readily recognized. Conversely, ideas that are not communicated constructively may be overlooked, ignored, or rejected, regardless of their potential value to an organization. This research contributes to the employee voice literature by introducing the concept of constructive voice delivery and examining its relationship with callings. In this endeavor, two field studies explored the influence of callings on constructive voice delivery. The first study examined these relationships from the employee perspective, identified organizational attachment as the mechanism driving the relationship, and highlighted the role psychological safety plays in strengthening the relationship. The second study explored the relationship between callings and constructive voice delivery from managers’ perspectives, revealing a negative relationship between callings and managerial ratings of constructive voice delivery and emphasized psychological safety’s role in strengthening this negative relationship. Furthermore, constructive voice delivery suppressed the positive effect callings have on employee performance. Taken together, the results of both studies demonstrate that constructive voice delivery is an important aspect of speaking up at work.

No abstract

Cooperative work can seldom be meaningfully reduced to a single performance criterion. However, there is little theory regarding how groups address tasks with multiple success criteria. Generalizing from the theory of task demonstrability we offer a foundation for understanding group performance on multifaceted tasks that includes a focus on subtask performance, overall performance, and the subjective experience of group members. We predict and find that the composition of groups with respect to member priorities (i.e., having a single member that is oriented toward an intellective criterion or multiple members oriented toward a judgmental criterion) outperform groups that do not meet these composition thresholds. Groups simultaneously meeting both thresholds outperform all comparisons, however their members report a poor shared understanding of the task, less cooperation, and less desire to work in that same group in the future. This research extends the traditional group performance literature into the more complex and ecologically valid area of multicriteria performance and addresses both theoretical and practical implications. (PsycINFO Database Record