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