Employee “voice” is important to organizations. When employee express voice by offering constructive ideas on how to make improvements, or pointing out harmful or wasteful practices, voice can enhance a firm’s ability to innovate and adapt to dynamic changes in the working environment. It is therefore important to understand what motivates and enables employees to speak up.

While an emerging body of research has linked personality or contextual factors to voice, there has been less emphasis on examining the underlying psychological mechanisms most closely related to voice. Further, prior work has failed to examine how these psychological mechanisms may differ for different types of voice. Jian Liang, Crystal Farh and Jiing-Lih Farh have thus taken a more nuanced look at both the nature of voice and why employees will speak up.

In their article, they argue that voice content can be characterized as being “promotive” or “prohibitive.” Whereas promotive voice expresses new ideas for improvement in the work unit or organization, prohibitive voice expresses concerns about work practices, incidents or employee behaviors that are harmful to the organization.

Although both promotive and prohibitive forms of voice challenge the status quo and are aimed at benefiting organizations, they are thought to affect voice audiences differently. Whereas the good intention behind the suggested improvements of promotive voice may be more readily recognized and interpreted by coworkers and supervisors as a positive behavior, pointing out problems through prohibitive voice may instead invoke negative emotions and defensiveness in the audience and be interpreted as complaining or cynicism.

This distinction between the two voice types suggests that employees might experience somewhat different psychological motivations before choosing to express promotive versus prohibitive voice. Three psychological motivations include: a) psychological safety (whether the employee thinks the outcomes of speaking up will be positive or negative), b) felt obligation for constructive change (the extent to which the employee is committed to developing new procedures and correcting problems in their organization), and c) organization-based self-esteem (the employee’s beliefs about their abilities and social worth in the workplace).

In an investigation of how these three psychological motivations relate to the two types of voice, the authors surveyed 239 employees and their supervisors in China and found that certain psychological antecedents were more likely to give rise to voice than others.

Specifically, all three psychological motivations positively influenced both types of voice. However, among the three, psychological safety predicted prohibitive voice most strongly. In other words, employees who felt assured that their voice would result in positive outcomes were more likely to take on the risk of calling attention to matters harmful to the firm. In contrast, felt obligation for constructive change was a strong predictor for promotive voice – people volunteered their ideas more often when they felt it was their duty to do so. Compared to the other factors, organization-based self-esteem had the weakest effect on both types of voice, in part because of the construct’s conceptual overlap with psychological safety or because of the study’s Chinese cultural context, where the emphasis on interpersonal harmony and reciprocation may have strengthened the effects of psychological safety and felt obligation. This requires further study.

Another key finding was that, although the psychological factors predicted promotive and prohibitive voice to different degrees, they also interacted to affect each other’s impact. While felt obligation strengthened the relationship between psychological safety and both forms of voice, organization-based self-esteem seemed to weaken the relationship between psychological safety and promotive voice. These findings suggest that voice is highest when multiple psychological motivations – particularly felt obligation and psychological safety – were simultaneously present.

The findings offer a few home truths for managers. “Even though companies hoping to benefit from the suggestions and concerns of their employees generally have the best intentions for encouraging voice, the unfortunate truth is employees are often uncomfortable about ‘voicing’. Our study calls on managers to recognize that several psychological factors can either facilitate or prevent employees from speaking up,” the authors said.

They suggested that managers can create a favorable environment for both promotive and prohibitive forms of employee voice by demonstrating an open attitude to employees’ ideas and providing mechanisms for voice (to enhance psychological safety), reminding employees they are valued members of the organization and capable of valuable input (to increase organization-based self-esteem), and emphasizing that employees can give back to the organization by making suggestions and pointing out ineffective processes (to increase felt obligation). Meanwhile, it is quite important to make voice a positive experience for employees, because such experience would enhance their self-esteem and increase the possibility that employees will engage in future instances of voice.