LEADERSHIP BEHAVIOUR AND EMPLOYEE VOICE

Leadership Behaviour and Employee Voice: Article Review

Leadership Behaviour and Employee Voice: Article Review

Introduction

In today's hypercompetitive business environment, employee comments and suggestions intended to improve organizational functioning are critical to performance. Citing different authors' works he says that the willingness of all members to provide thoughts and ideas about critical work processes characterizes successful learning in various types of teams. Yet, despite this “learning imperative,” many individuals do not work in environments where they perceive it as safe to speak up.

This presents an unsettling state of affairs: Voice, which we define as the discretionary provision of information intended to improve organizational functioning to someone inside an organization with the perceived authority to act, even though such information may challenge and upset the status quo of the organization and its power holders, is critical to organizational well-being yet insufficiently provided by employees, who see the risks of speaking up as outweighing the benefits.

Thus, it is important to better understand who speaks up with potentially valuable information and the organizational conditions that favor or inhibit such behavior. This paper presents review of the article Leadership Behaviour and Employee Voice: Is the Door Really Open? also mentioned in the list of references in a concise and comprehensive way.

Leadership Behaviour and Employee Voice: Article Review

Beginning the article Detert and Burris (2007) mention the notion of voice stems from the idea that employees recognize some source of dissatisfaction or opportunity for improving their own and/or their organization's well-being. Speaking up in such situations can feel risky because they involve pointing out need for improvement in a program or policy to those who may have devised, be responsible for, or feel personally attached to the status quo. Given this, along with the reality that voice cannot be coerced or readily designed into the in-role requirements of a job, an initial motivation to speak up is likely to manifest in behavior only when the net perceived benefits outweigh potential costs. Perceived potential benefits of speaking up include getting the problem solved as well as formal (e.g., money or promotion) or informal (e.g., recognition or status) rewards that might be associated with having one's ideas be well received and possibly implemented. Conversely, potential costs include “existence losses” (e.g., demotion or termination) and “relatedness losses” (e.g., humiliation or loss of social standing).

The employee friendly mode of an organization is generally considered synonymous with employee empowerment. In order to be effective, this mode requires an absence of organizational politics that may have an unfavorable impact on it. At the core of an employee friendly organization lies effective Human Resource Management, based on the Human Relations school of thought. Human Relations' thesis is that employee friendly organizations must necessarily enhance worker productivity. Research has also shown that considerate organizational leaders tend to have subordinates that are generally satisfied with their assigned jobs. Of course, job satisfaction should automatically lead employees to believe that their organizations are, at least in part, employee ...