The Phenomenon of Employee Voice in Organizations, How to Harness it For Success through Middle Management

Employees with great ideas often don’t speak up in their organizations. In organizations that have employees who are not afraid of speaking up, research shows that there are a myriad of positive outcomes. The topic of employee voice and creativity in organizations fascinates Nancy Lam, Chair of the Organizations and Responsible department at Saint Mary’s College in the School of Economics and Business Administration.

"It is common for people in the workplace to withhold voice from supervisors, or not speak up in situations where it can benefit the organization," Lam explained, "therefore the key to creativity and innovation is for management to unleash employee voice and act on employee input when employees do speak up."

Lam's primary research focus is on the organizational, dyadic and individual dynamics that can impact the process of employee voice up, down and across the hierarchies.  In organizational life, employees' decisions to speak up about relevant work issues have a significant impact on the ability of managers to make informed decisions and effectively drive strategic directions. 

Lam grew up in Sacramento. Her earliest interests included being an astronaut, a teacher, and a doctor. The latter she pursued throughout high school and college, majoring in molecular cell biology with an emphasis in neurobiology. “I am riveted by the neural networks of the brain,” said Lam.

While going to school, Lam looked to her friends going to the Berkeley Haas School of Business for inspiration. “They seemed so sophisticated,” she said. “They talked about consulting, they were in investment groups.” Even though she knew very little about the “business world,” she was challenged to minor in business. “I remember walking into my first upper division class in organizational behavior. I had never done a case study and had no idea what organizational behavior was. I was surrounded by eloquent business folks who knew exactly what to say, as it seemed to be at the time. That whole semester was scary, but I ended up getting an A plus in the class. I fell in love with the subject,” said Lam.

Post-college, she landed a job at Accenture. “My first job out of college was consulting. My plan was to take a few years off and make some money to pay for medical school, but the dot com boom was taking off in San Francisco. I had such a great time, I never went back,” said Lam.

Her main research focus on employee voice grew its roots in those early years. “I hung out with a lot of startup and tech folks at the time. Because of my tech and strategy experience, I got calls from recruiters on almost a weekly basis,” said Lam.

“By that time, I was in middle management. One of the things I wanted to figure out was how to solve a managerial problem I frequently encountered. I noticed a phenomenon where people at places of work were having conversations about something going on in the workplace. But then, when these same people went into meetings with their managers, a completely different conversation was happening. These employees’ side conversations and the conversations in meetings with their bosses didn’t align.

I wanted to figure out why and how this happens. How do you capture that voice, in order to get people to speak up about what they are really thinking about? Their voices, these side conversations, could really drive the most optimal organizational decisions for the team,” said Lam.

Lam looked for answers in academic journals. In her search, she found that she enjoyed the academic exploration and questioning more than working at her then-startup . At that job, she found the management didn’t exhibit leadership qualities she was used to in previous organizations. Looking above her at those who worked in higher level positions, she didn’t crave their management roles for herself.  Before she knew it, her research was taking her on a new path.  

At around that time, A professor friend of Lam’s  suggested that she look into doctoral programs.  Without much knowledge about what graduate school was like, Lam embarked on her doctoral studies at the New York University Stern School of Business.

“What really drew me to graduate school was this phenomenon of voice. I wanted to explore and unpack the phenomenon where people feel like they can’t speak up,” said Lam. As she dug deeper, she found this to be an organizational pattern.

“There is so much that isn’t being said by employees across the hierarchy in organizations,” said Lam. “It’s not that people don’t have creative ideas or constructive things to say. This is latent; it’s just not coming out, or it’s not going up the hierarchy.”

Since her doctoral program, Lam has been looking at employee voice in order to learn how organizations can better empower people to speak up. She looks specifically at power dynamics and creativity within organizations as well. “We want organizations to be more creative. A lot of managers in the top management teams purport that they want to be more creative with innovation within their organization. If you don’t have creativity within the organization, you’re not going to get innovation. What I’m looking at is how do you get ideas and constructive feedback to come out from the employee?  How can organizations and managers develop a context and exhibit behaviors that can unleash and leverage critical employee input for higher organizational performance?”

As a field researcher, Lam goes into organizations to conduct studies.  Lam has done field studies into employees within the medical industry and tech departments.  Lam also engaged in qualitative research. One study was on Hurricane Katrina, which correlates to her research on the differences in power and how information is interpreted. “I look at the micro perspective and processes within that. We looked what different players with different levels of power were saying the ten days after Hurricane Katrina.  Our data courses included quotes from high power individuals such as the President of the U.S. all the way down to the victims of New Orleans.

Why was the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina a disaster?  Were people consciously ignoring or biasing certain populations?  We didn’t find support for that.  Rather, the level of power affects how someone interprets information.  The same information can be interpreted differently by those with various levels of power.  It’s not that someone is, say, engaging in impression management.  It is that the level of power one has affects how information – the same information presented to someone else – is interpreted.”

To explain this more clearly, Lam uses an example of a CEO of a company relaying the information that sales have dropped 30 percent, making the company number two in the industry instead of number one. A person in the mail room, who is lower power in the organization, would interpret this information differently than the CEO or someone in high power. A person with a higher sense of power, for example, might say something that is more positive, future oriented, and more abstract. A person with a lower sense of power might say something or behave in a way that is more uncertain, more present oriented, and more detailed.

If you pan out and look at this interaction as a whole, you find disconnect between a lower power person and a higher power person. An employee in the upper management team will speak about this 30 percent drop in sale more along the lines of, “Oh, we will get back to number one down the line.” But a person in the mail room might panic, thinking they are going to be fired because sales dropped for the time being.

Over time that these disconnects can stifle employee voice, due to differences in perception and power. Employee voice in this case is defined not as expression of constructive employee input.

“Employee voice is a conscious process. People have a voice calculus where they weigh benefits and risks. If the benefits outweigh the risks, the employee will speak up. But not in the reverse,” said Lam. One of the things that can encourage employee voice is having psychological safety, the belief that if you do something to take a risk, you’re not going to be harmed by it personally, in the organization or within one’s team.

One main reason people don’t speak up is this perception of fear and risk of being seen as ignorant or as a troublemaker, which might affect their performance evaluations. This problem is consistent across the hierarchy in multiple sized organizations, across  industries.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re high up or low down on the totem pole. You’re going to experience employee silence, where your employees don’t speak up even if they have something constructive to say. Employee voice is extremely important for organizations. We know that when an organization has employee voice, they have better innovation and overall performance. “Employee voice is like brussel sprouts for organizations. It’s really good for them, but they don’t always get it,” said Lam.

What Lam aims to do is find ways for organizations to encourage their employees to speak up, by analyzing the precursors that lead to this behavior (or not). “Speaking up is different than speaking across to your peers, and it’s one of the hardest things for employees to do,” said Lam. “We do want organizations to get more employee voice,” said Lam.

Another area she looks at is propagation of creativity, specifically amongst middle managers. “Given that it is hard for employees to speak up the hierarchy, it is a conscious effort for them to actually do it. For example, say you give a creative idea. Someone gives the middle manager that idea. Do they pass it along?”

Middle managers in this regard act as gatekeepers. Their primary responsibility is to filter information. Do they bring the creative input up the hierarchy? Do they bring it up to their peers? Do they also tell their subordinates about this creative idea that could lead to innovation?” said Lam.

In one study, Lam found that middle managers were indeed taking this creative input up the hierarchy, as well as across and down. The biggest problem with middle management and creativity is that if there is time pressure, it can be a creativity killer. Also, if middle management doesn’t act as propagators, creativity and innovation can stall at their door. “Skip leadership, which means going to your boss’ boss or his superior, is rare,” said Lam. “Thus it is crucial that managers take creative input from their employees and propagate it throughout the organization.”

Lam looks at different methods for encouraging the flow of creativity. “One way I’ve been able to discern that we can really help organizations propagate employee voice, and creative voice, up and down the hierarchy, is to remove the perception of not having enough time in middle management,” said Lam. The idea that you have too much to do as a manager kills creativity.

A current project she is working on with Professor Arnav Sheth looks at the optimization of creative voice. In order to unleash creativity from employees, organizations have to devote resources to this process. However, organizations have finite resources. Lam and Sheth are exploring the optimal conditions for employee voice and creativity, as well as the inverse. Is there such a thing as too much creative voice? Using a finance-based model for hiring and firing, they developed a theory paper and applied it to creative employee voice. In the modeling they looked at ideals for employee voice. What constitutes too much? What constitutes too little? How much resource is the optimal amount to dedicate for the best outcome for the organization?

“We see that there are sub-optimal amounts of creative voice. You can have too little, or too much. What we know is that organizations don’t want is too little, but we’ve shown theoretically that too much creativity can harm organizations.  This is a new contribution we are bringing to the field.” said Lam. The next stage is to collect data to confirm their findings in the field.

Lam recently got a research grant from the SMC Alumni Association, one of two given out per year. Under the grant, she is going to look at bi-culturalism, defined as people who identify with more than one culture, alongside employee voice.

This particular study is exciting to Lam. It resonates with her also as Chinese-American as well as because of the current political climate in the United States. “I see this increasingly larger divide in the country. I feel like perhaps my research will be able to shed some light on what is happening, to try and bridge it a little more,” said Lam.