Amplifying Employee Voice? Situating Social Media in the Organisational Voice System

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Khan, Maria
Mowbray, Paula K
Wilkinson, Adrian
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2025
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In today's digitised workplace, it is important to understand how employee voice is affected by new technologies. Adopting a novel interdisciplinary approach, this paper uses the Escalator of Participation framework and the Technology Affordance lens to explore how modern communication technology, such as social media (SM), compares to traditional voice mechanisms. Findings from 52 in-depth interviews of managers and employees from two multinational subsidiaries show that SM provides new ways of voicing in synchronous and asynchronous settings that traditional voice mechanisms do not offer. Despite this, employees do not always choose SM for all voice types due to employees' perception that SM was suited better for some types of voice more than others and also being mindful of managerial preferences for non-SM mechanisms. We also provide implications for future research and practitioners through highlighting that the effectiveness of voice on SM is shaped by SM affordances, issue type, employee awareness of likely responses, and managerial willingness to engage constructively with voice on SM.

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New Technology, Work and Employment

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© 2025 The Author(s). New Technology, Work and Employment published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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This publication has been entered in Griffith Research Online as an advance online version.

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Social psychology

Human resources and industrial relations

Strategy, management and organisational behaviour

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Khan, M; Mowbray, PK; Wilkinson, A, Amplifying Employee Voice? Situating Social Media in the Organisational Voice System, New Technology, Work and Employment, 2025

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