Voices unheard: employee voice in the new century

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Wilkinson, Adrian
Gollan, Paul J
Kalfa, Senia
Xu, Ying
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2018
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Abstract

The concept of employee voice has attracted considerable attention in research since the 1980s primarily in the fields of Employment Relations/Human Resource Management (ER/HRM) and Organisational Behaviour (OB). Each of these disciplines focuses on different aspects of employee voice, the former examining the mechanisms for employees to have ‘a say’ in organisational decision-making (Freeman, Boxall, & Haynes, 2007; Gollan, Kaufman, Taras, & Wilkinson, 2015; Wilkinson & Fay, 2011) and the latter considering voice as an ‘extra-role upward communication behaviour’ (Morrison, 2014, p. 174) with the intent to improve organizational functioning. The purpose of voice is seen by each of these disciplines in a different way. ER/HRM perspectives are underpinned by the assumption that it is a fundamental democratic right for workers to extend a degree of control over managerial decision- making within an organisation (Kaufman, 2015; Wilkinson, Gollan, Lewin, & Marchington, 2010). Thus, everyone should have a voice and a lack of opportunities to express that voice may adversely affect workers’ dignity. In contrast, OB perspectives are underpinned more by a concern with organisational improvements, therefore leaving it much more to managerial discretion to reduce or change existing voice arrangements due to, for example, an economic downturn (Barry & Wilkinson, 2016).

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International Journal of Human Resource Management

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29

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5

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© 2018 Taylor & Francis (Routledge). This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The International Journal of Human Resource Management on 06 Mar 2018, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2018.1427347

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Human resources and industrial relations

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