Voices Unheard: Employee Voice in the New Century
The employment relations critique of how organisational behaviour has framed employee voice, and a corrective in a corpus whose voice cluster is built almost entirely from the other tradition. Wilkinson, Gollan, Kalfa and Xu set out the split. Employment relations and human resource management treat voice as a mechanism for having a say in decisions, underpinned by the assumption that some control over managerial decision making is a democratic right and that lacking it damages workers' dignity. Organisational behaviour treats it as extra-role upward communication intended to improve organisational functioning, which leaves its extent to managerial discretion. Their charge against organisational behaviour is that in seeking the antecedents of an individual's choice to speak or withhold, it never asks how organisations manufacture the constraints on the supply side; their charge against their own field is that it has narrowed voice to the airing of grievances.
The part worth citing is a taxonomy of five ways voice goes unheard. Black holes, where no structures exist at all, common in small firms and where work is precarious. Structures that are used but lost against institutional noise, so that voice is not heard rather than deliberately suppressed. The deaf ear, where management hears and discounts, illustrated by Bundaberg hospital, where managers set the evidential bar so high that single voices were ignored unless corroborated, and never sought the corroboration. Climates of silence produced through agenda setting and institutional structures. And differential access, where the scholarship treats workers as homogeneous while the opportunity to speak is shaped by gender, race and sexuality, and where the prevalent arrangements, unions and committees, are insufficient for the people they were not designed around.
This is an editorial introduction to a special issue rather than primary research, and its evidence is other people's. It is here for its framing. The macro, meso and micro levels it proposes, and the argument that voice can be designed out at the level of policy and regulation, are the structural counterpart to a literature that mostly measures whether individuals feel able to speak.
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