A Structural View of Employee Voice: Propositions Based on the Social Network Perspective

Current literature on employee voice emphasizes the importance of psychological factors in determining the frequency and breadth of employee’s suggestions, but does not explicitly discuss the influence of organizational structural factors. However, literature on social network analyses suggested that, at the organizational level, the network structure of an organization may influence the behaviors of the members of that organization. Similarly, the literature also suggests that, at the individual level, a member’s network position in the organization will also influence his or her behaviors that may influence both his or other organizational members’ interests. All these findings suggest that the literature on social network analyses of organizations will provide rich implications to the development of the research on employee voice behavior. Therefore, adopting a network perspective, this study examines such ignored structural factors at both the organizational and individual levels and proposes the relationships between the factors and employee voice. More specifically, we propose that, at the group or organizational level, high group density in a friendship network suppresses employee voice as employees will be constrained by their friendship relationships with colleagues. We also propose that, at the individual level, network centrality will influence employee voice though two opposite possibilities may exist. Besides these direct effects of those structural factors on employee voice behavior, these structural factor may also work with certain psychological factors, such as group psychological safety, to influence the tendency of organizational members to voice their opinions. Therefore, we propose that, at the organizational level, group psychological safety will positively moderate the relationship between group density and the voice behavior of such a relationship. Similarly, at the individual level, group psychological safety will positively moderate the relationship between a member’s network centrality and his or her voice behavior. Finally, as a members’ supervisor may exert a halo effect on the member, we further propose that, at the individual level, the network centrality of the member’s direct supervisor also positively moderates the relationship between the member’s network centrality and his or her voice behavior.