There's a tension between employees' desire for independent voice and the management agenda, write Michael Barry and Adrian Wilkinso

Barry, Michael

Wilkinson, Adrian

LSE Research Online

8/23/2016The HR literature won’t give you a complete picture ofemployee voiceblogs.lse.ac.uk /businessreview/2016/08/23/the-hr-literature-wont-give-you-a-complete-picture-of-employee-voice/For many years, Employment Relations scholars (with whom we identify) adopted the view articulated by Freemanand Medoff (1984) that collective mechanisms of employee voice could channel worker discontent so as to reducethe desire of dissatisfied workers to exit. They saw trade unions as the best agents to provide such voice, as theywere formally independent of the employer and thus had external legitimacy. But we also observe that there is atension between the aspiration of employees for an independent voice and a desire by management to institutevoice as part of its own agenda. Thus there are differences between the Industrial Relations (IR) conception of voicethat favours voice on employee terms, and the Human Resources/Organisation Behaviour conception that sees abenefit in management promoting voice to improve organisational communication and work unit performance.Indeed, employee voice has become widely studied by Organisational Behaviour (OB) scholars and from theirperspective voice is not viewed as a mechanism to provide collective representation of employee interests, but as anexpression of the desire and choice of individual workers to communicate information and ideas to management forthe benefit of the organisation. (Kaufman 2015) The OB literature follows the definition of Van Dyne and Le Pine(1998), which is that voice is a discretionary, pro-social, largely informal, individual behaviour. For OB, “pro-social” isbehaviour that is defined as being other-regarding (rather than self-regarding), and of benefit to the organisation orthe work unit.This work has informed two review papers that were written with the intention of being broad integrative reviews ofthe entire voice field (Klaas et al. 2012; Morrison 2011).We were intrigued and concerned that these reviews do notengage with conceptions of voice outside of OB, such as those coming from IR. It was not that they were unaware ofother literature but that they chose not to incorporate views from outside their own disciplinary area. Our aim in thispaper is to show that ignoring formal structures of voice, such as unions, works councils, staff associations orconsultative committees, is a mistake if we really want to understand the full range of voice possibilities.Our intention was not to discount the OB conception of voice, and indeed we accept that the OB conception of voice1/3is important in highlighting the value of constructive, individual employee voice behaviour missed by much of ourdiscipline which discounts the contribution of communicative and relational aspects of individual voice behaviour.Equally however we want to show that the OB conception of voice is at best partial, because its definition of voice asan activity that benefits the organisation leaves no room for considering voice as a means of challengingmanagement, or indeed simply as being a vehicle for employee self-determination.So what’s our problem with the OB conception of voice? We see it as narrow because OB researchers viewemployee behaviour from a unitarist lens in which ‘what is good for the firm must be good for the worker’. This viewdoes not properly consider how the employment relationship creates a divergence of interests between workers andmanagement that gives workers cause to have a voice on their own terms, and in another way creates a powerimbalance that can limit the capacity of workers to engage in voice.Given its unitarist frame of reference, the OB conception of voice is divorced from the historical development ofmechanisms of employee representation that act as vehicles for redressing distortions in power, or divergences ininterests, in the employment relationship. OB voice does not consider why there is a need for voice mechanisms topromote employee interests as well as management interests. Indeed, the dominant view in OB of voice behaviourthat does not meet the narrow test of being pro-social, is that it is complaining and, therefore, is not consideredvoice.Equally the OB literature does not properly consider the ways in which organisations create cultures that discouragethe act of speaking up, and in so doing act as supply-side constraints. Coupled with this is an inadequateconsideration in the OB literature of how the broader regulatory context shapes and constrains opportunities foremployees to engage in voice behaviours. OB research sees voice as operating in a world where organisationalactors are divorced from an institutional context composed of such things as labour law regulation, unionisation, andcompany policies or statutory regulations that mandate certain forms of employee involvement (Godard 2014).From an Industrial Relations perspective voice is an expression of the desire of workers to have their own say overmatters that affect their working lives. This broad approach to employee voice brings the concept closer to that of apolitical process in which voice is seen as an expression of industrial democracy.Given these observations, we would argue that the Industrial Relations field has much to offer in explainingemployee voice preferences and behaviours. Industrial Relations studies have sought to explain what features of thepattern of employee relations in different settings give rise to extensive or limited forms of voice. What they show ingeneral is that voice is likely to be more expansive where it is employee-initiated and where it is backed by statutoryprotections that mandate a role for employee voice in organisational decision-making.Management-initiated voice schemes on the other hand are likely to provide voice on terms dictated bymanagement, which are often limited to opening up lines of communication, and potentially extending voice into theprovision of consultation in matters of (employer) decision-making. A critical difference between the OrganisationalBehaviour and Industrial Relations literatures is that the former examines the role managers play in promoting ordiscouraging voice, while the latter illustrates that formal voice mechanisms mandated by law can create opportunityto contest management decisions.However, there are also some possible complementarities between Industrial Relations and OrganisationalBehaviour voice research. Thus, while the OB literature focuses on specific employee behaviours on an individuallevel whereas the IR literature tends to analyse, measure, or observe collective behaviours or actions, what IR doesexplain is the context in which individual behaviours and actions take place and what makes them more likely to takeplace. The intention of our research is to encourage integration, with the view of developing an overarchingconception of employee voice, rather than seeing IR and OB voice research continuing as distinct discipline silos.♣♣♣2/3Notes:This post is based on the authors’ paper Pro-Social or Pro-Management? A Critique of the Conception ofEmployee Voice as a Pro-Social Behaviour within Organizational Behaviour, British Journal of IndustrialRelations, Vol 54 no 2 pp 261-284 The post gives the views of its authors, not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School ofEconomics.Featured image credit: gratisography.com via Pexels, under a CC0 licence Before commenting, please read our Comment PolicyMichael Barry is Professor and Head, Department of Employment Relations and HumanResources, Griffith University. He has published on areas such as employee voice, employerassociations, and employment relations in the mining industry. His most recent edited book (withSkinner, J, T. Engleberg) is The Research Handbook of Employment Relations in Sport, EdwardElgar Press, Cheltenham, UK, 2016. Adrian Wilkinson is Professor of Employment  Relations at Griffith University,  Australia. He is aFellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) and a Fellow of the Australian Academy ofSocial Sciences is Joint Editor-in-Chief of the Human Resource Management Journal (HRMJ).    Copyright © 2015 London School of Economics3/3

The HR literature won’t give you a complete picture of employee voice

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