An Event-Level Decision-Making Perspective on Employee Voice and Silence

Abstract

Employee voice and silence are reactions to workplace events, but tend to be studied as general behavioral tendencies. We propose conceptualizing voice and silence on the event level and develop an expected utility framework incorporating multiple dimensions of subjective values and situational expectancies. This framework predicts individual event-level voice intentions, information sharing behavior, and the experience of conflicts between voice and silence. Through a vignette study (N = 241) and a second study with recalled events (N = 221), we demonstrate that expected utility scores for voice and silence exert counteracting influences on voice intentions and on sharing information. Our results suggest that event-level voice and silence represent endpoints of a continuum, and that the position on this continuum is driven by situational expected utility assessments. We discuss how the reasons for voice and silence form an amalgam of multiple dimensions and map the road for further research.