# The Social Consequences of Voice: An Examination of Voice Type and Gender on Status and Subsequent Leader Emergence

*McClean · Power & Equity, Voice & Silence · Academy of Management Journal · 2018 · Open access*

A three-wave field study and experiment showing that promotive voice (speaking up with ideas for improvement) increases status and leader emergence for men — but not for women. Men who speak up promotively gain the most status; women who speak up promotively gain no such benefit. The mechanism is gender status expectations: promotive voice signals competence and agency, which is consistent with male gender expectations and violated by female ones. The paper has direct implications for PS: a psychologically safe team climate may be necessary but not sufficient for equitable voice — even where people feel safe to speak up, the social rewards for doing so are distributed unequally by gender. This is the empirical evidence behind the argument that leader-centric PS models are incomplete when they ignore the structural inequalities within teams.

- **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/mcclean-et-al-2018/
- **View the source paper:** https://repository.arizona.edu/bitstream/handle/10150/632576/document(1).pdf
- **Interactive map:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/?mode=papers&node=mcclean-et-al-2018

## Connected concepts (12)

- [Calculus of Voice](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/the-calculus-of-voice.md)
- [Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/crenshaw-1989.md) (paper)
- [The Forms of Capital](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/bourdieu-1986.md) (paper)
- [An Exploratory Study of Employee Silence: Issues That Employees Don't Communicate Upward and Why](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/milliken-morrison-hewlin-2003.md) (paper)
- [Helping and Voice Extra-Role Behaviors: Evidence of Construct and Predictive Validity](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/van-dyne-lepine-1998.md) (paper)
- [Leadership Behavior and Employee Voice: Is the Door Really Open?](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/detert-burris-2007.md) (paper)
- [PS is Political](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/psychological-safety-is-political.md)
- [Typologies of Power](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/typologies-of-power.md)
- [Who Takes the Floor and Why: Gender, Power, and Volubility in Organizations](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/brescoll-2011.md) (paper)
- [Psychological Antecedents of Promotive and Prohibitive Voice: A Two-Wave Examination](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/liang-farh-farh-2012.md) (paper)
- [Reducing Power Gradients](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/reducing-power-gradients.md)
- [Barriers to PS](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/barriers-to-psychological-safety.md)