Handbook of Research on Employee Voice

Citation

Clare Mumford (2015), "Handbook of Research on Employee Voice", Personnel Review, Vol. 44 No. 4, pp. 662-664. https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-08-2014-0173

There will be much of interest for readers of Personnel Review in this edited Handbook. The editors define voice as “the ways and means through which employees attempt to have a say and potentially influence organizational affairs relating to issues that affect their work and the interests of managers and owners” (p. 5). This notion of employee voice is explored from the perspectives of industrial relations, human resource management, economics, political science, work psychology and organizational behaviour, and the book, comprising almost 500 pages, therefore covers a lot of ground.

The editors’ stated hope for the book is that it “will help the reader understand the debates associated with employee voice and appreciate the contribution of the different approaches to our understanding of what goes on in the workplaces that are at the heart of modern economies” (p. 3). The well-written acknowledgement and description of the multiple starting points in the introductory Chapter 1 is extremely useful for unpacking the central term of voice and exploring the distinctions that come with the different approaches from different fields. Nevertheless, it raised a question for me: if the term comes from such different origins, if voice can refer to such different concepts as structures or processes or individual behaviour, are there benefits, and for whom, in collating this very different work into one volume? My conclusion is that there are benefits, although I found myself disappointed in two regards in terms of how well the book achieves what the editors hope for it. The first disappointment is about the extent to which the book helps the reader to understand and engage across the breadth of disciplines, rather than being simply a compendium of separate chapters. The second is about what I felt was a missing contribution to our understanding of the concept of voice. I will provide a quick summary of the book’s structure and contents before coming back to these two points.

The book is organized in four parts. Part I, entitled “Perspectives and Theories of Voice”, comprises eight chapters, each addressing a different theoretical perspective after Chapter 1 introduces the terrain. Chapter 2 provides a historical analysis of voice before Hirschman, while Chapter 3 summarizes Hirschman’s (consumed-oriented) model of exit, loyalty and voice and discusses the difference between consumers and employees. Chapter 4 discusses voice as a transaction cost in employment relations, while Chapter 5 historically traces voice, as “having a say”, in various forms of industrial democracy in North America and Europe. The human resource management (HRM)-oriented relationship between voice and high-performance work systems is covered in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 explains voice through labour process theory and Chapter 8 elaborates on the concepts of employee voice and silence in theories pertaining to organizational behaviour.

Part II is structured according to different Actors, with Chapters 9-13 focusing, respectively, on employers, line managers, unions, employees and finally civil society organizations. Part III reviews various Forms of voice, with Chapters 14-21 entitled “Collective bargaining”, “Works councils”, “Joint consultative committees”, “Individual voice: grievance and other procedures”, “Task-based voice: teamworking, autonomy and performance”, “Workplace partnership”, “Voice in the mutual gains organization”, and “Non-union employee representation”.

Part IV collects together eight chapters on the theme of Evaluating Voice, which sets out some new proposals and future challenges for research. Chapter 22 covers legal regulation with respect to voice structures, processes and rights for employees. Chapter 23 provides a review of the comparative literature across countries to look at how and why there are national differences in participative structures and processes. Chapter 24, on employee silence, discusses how the industrial relations literature provides some insight into organizational behaviour perspectives on employee silence by considering the notion of relational exchange. Chapter 25 covers voice in the context of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and argues for recognition of the distinctiveness of the personal/professional relationship between employer and employee in smaller firms. Chapter 26 deals with the notion of missing voices and reviews HRM literature on diversity management for the inclusion of women’s, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT), and ethnic minority voices. Chapter 27 discusses the role of new network and media technologies in shaping employee voice. Chapter 28 discusses the psychological relationship between voice and employee engagement, and proposes the integrating concept of employee voice engagement. The final chapter, 29, covers the future of employee voice.

The chapters predominantly contain theory, literature reviews or models. As such, the book serves well as a compendium of academic literature. I can imagine it being thumbed by postgraduate students trying to understand the intricacies of different theoretical perspectives, and used by researchers as a reminder of key points and references. There is a huge amount of interesting and useful material. I was absorbed by many of the chapters, and there are some wonderful bibliographies which have inspired me to investigate other material about which I was previously unaware and which sounds fascinating. On that level, the book does work.

Yet I would have loved something a little extra that brought the different discussions together a bit more clearly so that the book as a whole, rather than the separate chapters individually, became useful. As the outline above demonstrates, a lot of material is included but with only a limited thread to pull it all together. As it stands, it is left to the reader to work quite hard at understanding the contributions that each discipline can make to the others. Often the chapters stay within their discipline rather than talking across to others. The first task in each new chapter is therefore to work out in which of the many ways the term “voice” is being defined and applied. Some further signposting and summarising before each of the four parts, for instance, would have been appreciated to aid the cross-disciplinary conversations. I found the final chapter’s exploration of the way in which the different theoretical perspectives on voice have different implications for the concept of work really fascinating. More of such integration would have been welcome.

There is, then, undoubtedly a broad range of perspectives contained in the book. However, there is often a confident, “this is the way the world works” realist style of writing which reifies the theories, mechanisms and structures and downplays the messiness and complexity of communicative processes and the use of theories in real-life practice. As such, the book’s usefulness feels more limited for practitioners who are grappling with knotty HRM or employee engagement issues and might want some support. My second disappointment then is this: I wondered why the editors had stopped at the range of perspectives they had chosen. I would love to have seen as an additional chapter some inclusion of more discursive or phenomenologically oriented research which explored voice issues through the lens of communicative practice, sensemaking or storytelling (I found myself thinking of Boje’s (1995) discussion of the plural, and contested, stories in Disneyland, in which certain voices and viewpoints become marginalized, for instance). I was missing writing that imbued the voice models and theories with individual human speech and experience, that acknowledged matters of uncertainty and interpretation when using theories, mechanisms and structures. For instance, the Columbia space shuttle disaster is referenced briefly as an example of a situation where employee failure to engage in voice led to disastrous results (p. 455). That Columbia case study might point to the complexity of understanding what an instance of “voice” really means, since there seems to be some evidence that engineers did speak up (see for instance, Starbuck and Farjoun, 2005) but how their utterances were framed and responded to led to the emergent concern being downplayed.

Such matters, nevertheless, are clearly not the intention of the editors in their compilation of the handbook and it might be churlish of me to wish for a broader, even more demanding scope given what the book already contains. Next time I am in a rush to finish an abstract for a conference paper, I will undoubtedly scan a number of chapters in the book to remind myself of the literature and identify authors, theories and papers which I might turn to in order to support my arguments. In this regard, the Handbook clearly fulfils a valuable function.