Speak! Paradoxical Effects of a Managerial Culture of ‘Speaking Up’
| Author | Miguel Pina e Cunha,Arménio Rego,Stewart R. Clegg,Ace Volkmann Simpson |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12306 |
| Published date | 01 October 2019 |
| Date | 01 October 2019 |
British Journal of Management, Vol. 30, 829–846 (2019)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12306
Speak! Paradoxical Eects of a Managerial
Culture of ‘Speaking Up’
Miguel Pina e Cunha, Ace Volkmann Simpson ,1Stewart R. Clegg1
and Arm´
enio Rego2,3
Nova School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1099-032 Lisbon, Portugal, 1UTS
Business School, University of TechnologySydney, PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia, 2Cat´
olica
Porto Business School, Universidade Cat´
olica Portuguesa, R. de Diogo Botelho 1327, 4169-005 Porto,Portugal,
and 3Business Research Unit, Instituto Universit´
ario de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL)
Corresponding author email: mpc@novasbe.pt
We explore the intrinsic ambiguity of speaking up in a multinational healthcare sub-
sidiary. A culture change initiative, emphasizing learning and agility through encourag-
ing employees to speak up, gaverise to paradoxical eects. Some employees interpreted
a managerial tool for improving eectiveness as an invitation to raise challenging points
of dierence rather than as something ‘beneficial for the organization’. Weshow that the
process of introducinga culture that aims to encourage employees to speak up can produce
tensions and contradictions that make various types of organizational paradoxes salient.
Telling people to ‘speak up!’ may render paradoxical tensions salient and even foster a
sense of low PsySafe.
Introduction
In a classical view, managerialism argues that or-
ganizations should be normatively integrated by
shared values expressed from a single source of
managerial authority that is founded on tech-
nical rationality and in which success is mea-
sured merely in terms of profit (Klikauer, 2013).
Managerialism has been challenged from various
academic positions (Akella, 2008; Alvesson and
Willmott, 1992; Fournier and Grey, 2000). Not
only critical scholars have reservations about
Weare grateful to our participants at the research site for
their valuabletime. We are especiallyindebted to the CEO
for their support and the critical reading of an earlier ver-
sion of the manuscript. Miguel Cunha wishes to thank
the Facultad de Administracion, Universidad de los An-
des, Bogot´
a, where he started drafting this paper. We are
grateful to our editor and anonymous reviewers, to Filipa
Castanheira, Luca Giustiniano and to the participants in
our sections at the 2016 PROS and EGOS meetings for
their important feedback.
[Correction added on 25 April 2018, after firstonline pub-
lication: the second aliation of the fourth author was
initially removed and was added in this version.]
managerialism. Even in terms of the functional-
ist frame of reference to the need for organiza-
tional eciency and eectiveness (the prime con-
cern of managerialism), questions havebeen raised
concerning the value of encouraging employees,
even within limits, to express their concerns and
insights (Delbridge and Keenoy, 2010; Wilkinson
et al., 2004). It is what employees should be al-
lowed to address that is seen to be significant. The
limits to legitimate questioning are the main fo-
cus. Not all employees will frame definitions of
the situation in accord with managerialist pre-
suppositions. Accordingly, dierences in employee
and managerial interpretations of what it means
to speak up can generate misunderstandings and
paradoxical tensions.Employee disagreement with
management has most frequently been framed as
disrespectful or wrong by functionalists (Hofst-
ede, 2001). On occasion, this may be because of
an environment in which individual fear of speak-
ing up flourishes (Detert and Edmondson, 2011;
Morrison and Milliken, 2000). In the past, orga-
nizational politics frequently privileged employee
compliance with managerial fiat (Clegg, 1989).
C2018 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
830 M. P. Cunha et al.
Increasingly,however, managers are being encour-
aged by supervisors to recognize the value of
adopting more ‘open’ cultures that encourage em-
ployees to speak up.
The common definition of speaking up is ‘shar-
ing one’s ideas with someone with the perceived
power to devote organizational attention or re-
sources to the issue raised’(Detert and Burris, 2007,
p. 870; our emphasis). Such encouragement, al-
beit already a form of subordination, is frequently
glossed as ‘empowerment’ (Detert and Trevino,
2010). Speaking up traverses a considerable con-
tinuum: from sharing one’s ideas as ways of en-
hancing eciency and eectiveness to articulating
‘non-issues’ in order to change the organizational
agenda (Clegg, 1989). While the former does not
typically challenge the organization through the
expression of voice, the latter does: typically it is
defined as ‘confronting the organization’ (Jablin,
1987, p.718; see also Mowbray,Wilkinson and Tse,
2015).
Speaking up has attracted considerable pub-
licity of late, with the emergence and spread of
the hash tag #MeToo in the movie and other in-
dustries. Such speaking up potentially challenges
embedded conventional managerial wisdom and
its sustaining conventions (Burris, 2012), in this
case highly gendered conventions. The impact of
voice expressed in challenging waysis indicated by
the frequent fate of whistleblowers (Alford, 2002;
Rothschild, 2008, 2013). If the individual is to feel
secure in speaking up, ‘psychological safety’ in do-
ing so is required. The notion of psychological
safety (PsySafe) has attracted significant research
attention since the 1990s. Kahn (1990, p. 708) de-
fined PsySafe as the employee’s ‘sense of being
able to show and employ one’s self without fear
of negative consequences to self-image, status, or
career’. Edmondson and Lei (2014, p. 24) define
PsySafe as favourable ‘perceptions of the conse-
quences of taking interpersonal risks in a partic-
ular context such as a workplace’. PsySafe is seen
as a means of encouraging voice that is challeng-
ing rather than merely supportive of dominant as-
sumptions; however, the level of PsySafe that is
managerially assumed may dier widely from the
sense that employees make of managerial initia-
tives.Present practice is invariably informed by the
traditions of the past. Managers used to exercising
managerial fiat may be unpreparedor unwilling to
accommodate challenging voice behaviours, lead-
ing to tensions and contradictions.
In this study we explore an intrinsic ambigu-
ity in speaking up from which stem paradoxical
eects. Our research context is a Southern-
European subsidiary of Athina (a pseudonym), a
multinational healthcare company undergoing a
culture change initiative encouragingemployees to
speak up.1The assumption habitually underpin-
ning the intentional adoption of a culture of speak-
ing up is that it is ‘beneficial for the organiza-
tion’. We question what it means for an abstract
value to be beneficial to an organization. Who re-
ceives the benefit? Dierent stakeholders may ex-
tract dierent benefits and what is beneficial for
one is not necessarily so for another. We thereby
problematize the notion of speaking up by uncov-
ering its ambiguous conceptual core. We focus on
voice expressed in challenging ways to explore the
paradoxes made salient by the interplay between
(1) the explicit desire of top management to en-
courage employees’ speaking up and (2) the com-
plex, plural and inconsistent ways in which em-
ployees interpret this espoused value. The politics
of speaking are illustrated by analysing qualita-
tive data on voice througha paradox lens (Cunha,
Clegg and Cunha, 2002; Smith and Lewis, 2011),
describing the simultaneous presence of appar-
ently contradictory but interrelated dualistic mes-
sages, symbols or situations, creating dilemmas for
respondents. Individually, each component of a
paradox appears rational; when juxtaposed, how-
ever, they appear illogical, incompatible and even
absurd (Lewis, 2000; Smith and Lewis, 2011). The
‘situations of almost impossible choice’ presented
by paradoxes highlight the ‘seeming irrationality
or absurdity of the situation’they pose for employ-
ees (Putnam, Fairhurst and Banghart, 2016, p. 75).
To engage with the paradoxes of speaking up,
we ask: What paradoxes become salient whenan or-
ganization apparently decides to encourage its em-
ployees to speak up? Why would someone refuse,
without being absurd, an invitation to speak up?
The paper is structured as follows: after discussing
1Speaking up is an issue of growing importance within
healthcare settings due to both increased marketcompeti-
tion and public scrutiny (Edmondson et al., 2016). High-
profile scandals of long-standing institutional abuse and
mistreatment of service users has led to public inquiries,
and subsequently healthcare policies,calling for the devel-
opment of open and honest reporting cultures. Initiatives
aiming to reverse so-called ‘closed cultures’ and support
‘speaking up’ behaviours in sta have followed (Dean,
2014).
C2018 British Academy of Management.
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