Pro‐Social or Pro‐Management? A Critique of the Conception of Employee Voice as a Pro‐Social Behaviour within Organizational Behaviour
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12114 |
| Author | Michael Barry,Adrian Wilkinson |
| Date | 01 June 2016 |
| Published date | 01 June 2016 |
Pro-Social or Pro-Management? A
Critique of the Conception of Employee
Voice as a Pro-Social Behaviour within
Organizational Behaviour
Michael Barry and Adrian Wilkinson
Abstract
For many years, the employment relations (ER) literature took the perspective
that employee voice via trade unions could channel discontent and reduce exit,
thereby improving productivity. In organizational behaviour (OB) research
voice has also emerged as an important concept, and a focus of this research has
been to understand the antecedents of the decision of employees to engage or not
engage in voice. In OB research, however, voice is not viewed as it is in ER as
a mechanism to provide collective representation of employee interests. Rather,
it is seen as an expression of the desire and choice of individual workers to
communicate information and ideas to management for the benefit of the orga-
nization. This article offers a critique of the OB conception of voice, and in
particular highlights the limitations of its view of voice as a pro-social
behaviour. We argue that the OB conception of voice is at best partial because
its definition of voice as an activity that benefits the organization leaves no room
for considering voice as a means of challenging management, or indeed simply
as being a vehicle for employee self-determination.
1. Introduction
Employee voice has been a major topic in the field of employment relations
(ER) for many years. In the 1980s, the ideas of Hirschman (1970) inspired
interest in voice as an alternative to employee exit, and the early work on
voice focused on unions as the main instrument of voice (Freeman and
Medoff 1984). The continuing difficulties facing organized labour have, more
recently, given voice broader significance within the field, and there has been
Both authors are at Griffith University.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
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British Journal of Industrial Relations
54:2 June 2016 0007–1080 pp. 261–284 doi: 10.1111/bjir.12114
interest in voice in non-union as well as union contexts (Benson 2000; Boxall
et al. 2007; Gollan et al. 2014; Gomez et al. 2010). In contemporary ER
studies, voice mechanisms are seen as viable substitutes for flagging union-
ism, or alternatively as possible ways of substituting other mechanisms for
unions in instances when employee voice schemes are initiated by manage-
ment (Charlwood and Pollert 2014; Marchington 2007; Wilkinson et al.
2013).
For many years, the ER literature adopted Freeman and Medoff’s (1984)
view that collective voice could channel discontent and reduce exit, thereby
improving productivity. Freeman and Medoff (1984) saw trade unions as the
best agents to provide such voice, as they were generally independent of the
employer and thus added legitimacy. However, it is important to note that
voice structures can be contested. There can be tension between the aspira-
tions of employees for voice, including an independent form of voice, and a
desire by management to institute voice as part of its human resource man-
agement (HRM) agenda.
Employee voice has also emerged as an important concept for organiza-
tional behaviour (OB) scholars who are interested in understanding the ante-
cedents of the decision of employees to engage or not engage in voice
(Greenberg and Edwards 2009; Morrison 2011, 2014). In OB research,
however, voice is not viewed as it is in ER as a mechanism to provide
collective representation of employee interests. Rather, it is seen as an expres-
sion of the desire and choice of individual workers to communicate informa-
tion and ideas to management for the benefit of the organization. The OB
literature follows the highly cited definition of voice that is offered by Van
Dyne and LePine (1998), which is that it is discretionary, pro-social, largely
informal, individual behaviour. For OB, ‘pro-social’ is a behaviour that is
defined as being other-regarding (rather than self-regarding), and of benefit
to the organization or the work unit. Interestingly, OB research on voice has
extended into mainstream management journals, giving this interpretation of
voice greater reach, and also potentially challenging other conceptions of
voice. In this article, we have been stimulated by two recent review papers
that were written with the intention of being broad integrative reviews of the
entire voice field (Klaas et al. 2012; Morrison 2011). Of concern to us is that
although these papers are published in management rather than OB journals,
they do not engage with conceptions of voice outside of OB, such as those
coming from ER. Consequently, they are not integrative reviews because
they do not consider other conceptualizations, but instead ignore them or
shunt them down another conceptual and theoretical path, leaving them
sealed off as irrelevant to the view of voice that they seek to present.
This article offers a critique of the OB conception of voice, and in particu-
lar highlights the limitations of its view of voice as a pro-social behaviour. At
the outset, this article acknowledges and will argue that the OB conception of
voice is important in highlighting the value of constructive, individual
employee voice behaviour, and in this way has much to offer an ER audience.
Indeed, in focusing on the formal and collective mechanisms of voice, we
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics.
262 British Journal of Industrial Relations
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