How and when managers reward employees’ voice: The role of proactivity attributions

Abstract

Recent voice research has noted that providing adequate job rewards for speaking up can sustainably motivate voice from employees. We examine why managers who seek out voice at work might not always properly reward the behavior. Drawing on theories of dispositional attribution, we propose that, in general, managers tend to reward voice because it signals to them that employees possess a valued underlying trait: proactivity, which is characterized by change-orientation and foresight. However, we argue that when managers engage in more voice solicitation—that is, explicitly ask for voice and take a listening posture toward it—their tendency to infer proactivity from employees’ voice weakens. Thus, we make a case that voice solicitation, a managerial behavior intended to set facilitating conditions for speaking up at work, inadvertently weakens the (indirect) relationship between employee voice and job rewards. We establish support for our theory in a set of 2 studies with complementary designs. Study 1 was a pre-registered between-subjects experiment that used a realistic vignette design with an online panel of 592 working adults based in the United States. Study 2 was a multisource field survey with a sample of 385 employees and their managers working at the India branch of a global technology company in the oil and gas industry. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our results.