Could you transfer my voice to the leader? : Antecedents and consequences of transit voice

Abstract

In voice research, voice has generally been viewed as an individual action; that is, one employee generates ideas and conveys them to the leader by him/herself. However, a recent study (Detert, Burris, Harrison, & Martin, 2013) suggests that employees regularly cooperate with one another in the voice process. To date, this phenomenon has received limited research attention. To fill this research gap, we introduce a cooperative voice tactic, transit voice, which is defined as a voice tactic by which employees ("informants") speak out to their peers ("transferors") and ask them to transfer their messages to leaders. Drawing on extant theories on social status/power (e.g., Halevy, Chou & Galinsky, 2011; Keltner, Gruenfeld & Anderson, 2003), we investigate antecedents and consequences of transit voice in two field survey studies. In Study 1, results indicate that employee's status was negatively related to the adoption of transit voice, and this relationship was strengthened when teams had low participative leaders and when teams had low competitive goals. The results of Study 2 showed 1) an interaction effect between informant's status and transferor's status on informant's transit voice toward transferor, in that low status members were more likely to ask high status peers to engage in transit voice; 2) informant's transit voice toward transferor was positively related to leader's endorsement on that voiced issue; 3) informant's transit voice toward transferor that was aggregated at the team level was positively related to team performance when teams had high leader-member exchange differentiation and low competitive goals.