# Speaking Up to Prevent Harm: A Systematic Review of the Safety Voice Literature

*Noort, Reader & Gillespie · Voice & Silence, Safety & Error, Ecological, Measurement & Method · Safety Science · 2019 · Open access*

The systematic review that made safety voice a construct in its own right rather than employee voice with a hazard attached. Noort, Reader and Gillespie screened the literature down to 48 articles and integrated 256 antecedents, 7 voice pragmatics and 23 outcomes into an ecological framework spanning Erez and Gati's individual, group, institutional and external levels, with variables that manifest differently at each: power appears as personal power at the individual level, as hierarchy and leaders' actions at the group level, and as hierarchical structures at the institutional one.

Three claims do the work. Safety voice sits closer to prohibitive than to promotive voice, since it responds to a perceived hazard and is bounded by the content of the message rather than by the behaviour, which is otherwise hard to tell apart from employee voice. The field has wrongly treated it as an organisational phenomenon: only 29% of people's concerns about physical risk relate to work at all, and 288,211 deaths were attributed to non-work accidents in the UK between 1979 and 2014, so a literature built in hospitals and cockpits generalises from a fraction of the cases. And the cost structure is asymmetric in a way the field has not absorbed. If raising a concern carries a small cost and a prevented incident a much larger benefit, a rational speaker should produce a large number of false alerts for each correct one, which turns over-reporting from a nuisance into the predicted signature of a system that is working.

The methodological critique is the sharpest part and lands on much of this corpus. The literature treats post hoc self-report as reliable data about a behaviour, and reports of behaviour are not the behaviour; findings are largely correlational, in-situ observation is scarce, and studying the full chain is ethically awkward because operationalising who gets hurt means exposing someone to a hazard.

Two things to hold while reading it. The framework is descriptive rather than predictive, and the review synthesises what has been published rather than testing anything. More striking for a map centred on psychological safety: Edmondson is not cited once in the entire review, and psychological safety appears a single time, as one antecedent among the 256, reached through other people's reviews. That is worth stating plainly, because it shows what the safety literature looks like when it develops the speaking-up problem without the psychological safety tradition, and the overlap it does find with employee voice is with Morrison rather than with Edmondson.

- **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/noort-reader-gillespie-2019/
- **View the source paper:** https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2019.04.039
- **Interactive map:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/?mode=papers&node=noort-reader-gillespie-2019

## Neighbours (12)

- [Conceptualizing Employee Silence and Employee Voice as Multidimensional Constructs](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/van-dyne-ang-botero-2003.md) (paper)
- [Employee Voice and Silence](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/morrison-2014.md) (paper)
- [Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/hirschman-1970.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)
- [Crew Resource Mgmt](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/crew-resource-management-and-psychological-safety.md)
- [Safety Voice and Safety Listening During Aviation Accidents: Cockpit Voice Recordings Reveal That Speaking-Up to Power Is Not Enough](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/noort-reader-gillespie-2021.md) (paper)
- [Silence That May Kill: When Aircrew Members Don't Speak Up and Why](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/bienefeld-grote-2012.md) (paper)
- [The Deepwater Horizon Explosion: Non-Technical Skills, Safety Culture, and System Complexity](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/reader-oconnor-2014.md) (paper)
- [PS in Aviation](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/psychological-safety-aviation.md)
- [Safety in High-Reliability Organizations: The Role of Upward Voice, Team Learning, and Safety Climate](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/silla-gajudo-gracia-2025.md) (paper)
- [Speaking Up at Work](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/speaking-up-at-work.md)
- [Walking the Plank: An Experimental Paradigm to Investigate Safety Voice](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/noort-reader-gillespie-2019b.md) (paper)