The Field Guide › Paper
Morrison's agenda-setting review is the piece that consolidated the scattered voice-and-silence literature into a single field and set its research programme; it is the review her own 2023 'decade later' revisits. It first does definitional work: voice is informal, discretionary, improvement-oriented upward communication of ideas, concerns or problem information to someone who could act on it, a constructive but status-quo-challenging act; silence is the withholding of such input, and crucially not the mere absence of speech (someone with nothing to say is not silent in this sense). At the centre sits the decision calculus the field had converged on: whether to speak is governed by two judgements, efficacy (will voice actually change anything?) and safety or risk (will it rebound on me?), with voice more likely as both rise and silence more likely as they fall. This two-judgement efficacy-and-safety calculus is the direct ancestor of later two-gate treatments of the voice decision. Morrison's distinctive move is to argue that this rational-calculus picture is incomplete in two ways. Much silence is not a deliberate weighing of costs and benefits at all but an automatic, emotionally-driven response: fear can short-circuit systematic processing, and people carry implicit voice theories, taken-for-granted schemas about the danger of speaking up in a hierarchy (learned early, perhaps partly evolved) that fire regardless of how approachable a given manager actually is. And voice is not purely prosocial, since image, career and identity motives also pull toward speaking. She integrates all this into a single model in which a latent voice opportunity resolves into voice or silence according to the balance of motivators and inhibitors, a Lewinian force field of driving and restraining forces operating through prosocial motivation, the expected-utility calculus, and automatic processes, which then feeds unit-level outcomes (performance, turnover) and outcomes for the employee (how the voice is evaluated, which depends heavily on what is said, how, and to whom). Psychological safety appears here as one motivator among many rather than the whole story, and the review notes the useful finding (Liang et al.) that safety is more tightly bound to prohibitive, problem-focused voice than to promotive, suggestion-focused voice. For this corpus it is the foundational anchor of the voice-silence cluster and the upstream source for the calculus-of-voice work, sitting alongside Morrison and Milliken (2000) on organisational silence and the Detert-and-colleagues strand on leadership and implicit voice theories.