Abstract
We extend the field’s understanding of voice recognition by examining peer responses to voice. We investigate how employees can help peers get a status boost from voicing, while also raising their own status, by introducing the concept of amplification—public endorsement of another person’s contribution, with attribution to that person. In two experiments and one field study, we find that amplification enhances status both for voicers and for those who amplify voice. Being amplified was equally beneficial for voicers who framed their ideas promotively and prohibitively (improvement-focused and problem-focused, respectively; Study 1), and for men and women (Study 2). Furthermore, amplified ideas were rated as higher quality than nonamplified ideas. Amplification also helped amplifiers: participants reading experimentally manipulated meeting transcripts rated amplifiers as higher status than those who self-promoted, stayed quiet, or contributed additional ideas (Studies 1 and 2). Finally, in an intervention in a nonprofit organization, select employees trained to use amplification attained higher status in their work groups (Study 3). Overall, these results increase our understanding of how social actors can capitalize on instances of voice to give a status boost to voicers who might otherwise be overlooked, and help organizations realize the potential of employees’ diverse perspectives.
REFERENCES
- 2014. Best practice recommendations for designing and implementing experimental vignette methodology studies. Organizational Research Methods, 17: 351–371. Google Scholar
- 2015. Is the desire for status a fundamental human motive? A review of the empirical literature. Psychological Bulletin, 141: 574–601. Google Scholar
- 2001. Who attains social status? Effects of personality and physical attractiveness in social groups. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81: 116–132. Google Scholar
- 2009. Why do dominant personalities attain influence in face-to-face groups? The competence-signaling effects of trait dominance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96: 491–503. Google Scholar
- 2014).
Do status hierarchies benefit groups? A bounded functionalist account . In J. ChengJ. L. TracyC. Anderson (Eds.), The psychology of social status: 47–70. New York, NY: Springer. Google Scholar ( - 2014. Matthew: Effect or fable? Management Science, 60: 92–109. Google Scholar
- 1951. Channels of communication in small groups. American Sociological Review, 16: 461–468. Google Scholar
- 2019. Answers to 18 questions about open science practices. Journal of Business and Psychology, 34: 257–270. Google Scholar
- 2015. When voice matters: A multilevel review of the impact of voice in organizations. Journal of Management, 41: 1530–1554. Google Scholar
- 2015. Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67: 1–48. Google Scholar
- 1999. Explaining how preferences change across joint versus separate evaluation. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 39: 41–58. Google Scholar
- 2012. Status conflict in groups. Organization Science, 23: 323–340. Google Scholar
- 2018. Status dynamics. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 5: 183–199. Google Scholar
- 1979. Organizational structure, attitudes and behavior. Research in Organizational Behavior, 1: 169–208. Google Scholar
- 1972. Status characteristics and social interaction. American Sociological Review, 37: 241–255. Google Scholar .
- 1997. Gender- and race-based standards of competence: Lower minimum standards but higher ability standards for devalued groups. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72: 544–557. Google Scholar
- 2014).
What’s in a name? Status, power, and other forms of social hierarchy . In J. T. ChengJ. L. TracyC. Anderson (Eds.), The psychology of social status: 71–95. New York, NY: Springer. Google Scholar ( - 2012. Who takes the floor and why: Gender, power, and volubility in organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 56: 622–641. Google Scholar
- 2003. Recognizing and utilizing expertise in work groups: A status characteristics perspective. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48: 557–591. Google Scholar
- 2012. The risks and rewards of speaking up: Managerial responses to employee voice. Academy of Management Journal, 55: 851–875.Link , Google Scholar
- 2013. Speaking up vs. being heard: The disagreement around and outcomes of Employee Voice. Organization Science, 24: 22–38. Google Scholar
- 1963. Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for research. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally. Google Scholar
- 2007. Shared leadership in teams: An investigation of antecedent conditions and performance. Academy of Management Journal, 50: 1217–1234.Link , Google Scholar
- 2014. Divide and conquer: When and why leaders undermine the cohesive fabric of their group. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107: 1033–1050. Google Scholar
- 2017. A meta-analysis of voice and its promotive and prohibitive forms: Identification of key associations, distinctions, and future research directions. Personnel Psychology, 70: 11–71. Google Scholar
- 2013. Two ways to the top: Evidence that dominance and prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to social rank and influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104: 103–125. Google Scholar
- 2006. Influence: The psychology of persuasion, vol. 3. New York, NY: William Morrow. Google Scholar
- 2006.
Expectation states theory . In J. Delamater (Ed.), Handbook of social psychology: 29–51. New York, NY: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Google Scholar - 2011. The dynamics of warmth and competence judgments, and their outcomes in organizations. Research in Organizational Behavior, 31: 73–98. Google Scholar
- 2001. Minority dissent and team innovation: The importance of participation in decision making. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86: 1191–1201. Google Scholar
- 2011. Implicit voice theories: Taken-for-granted rules of self-censorship at work. Academy of Management Journal, 54: 461–488.Link , Google Scholar
- 2010. Speaking up to higher ups: How supervisor and skip-level leaders influence employee voice. Organization Science, 21: 241–270. Google Scholar
- 1999. Attaining decision quality and commitment from dissent: The moderating effects of loyalty and competence in strategic decision-making teams. Academy of Management Journal, 42: 389–402.Link , Google Scholar
- 1993. Task cues, dominance cues, and influence in task groups. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78: 51–60. Google Scholar
- 2003.
The power of high-quality connections . In K. S. CameronJ. E. DuttonR. E. Quinn (Eds.), Positive organizational scholarship: Foundations of a new discipline: 263–278. San Francisco, CA: Barrett-Koehler. Google Scholar - 2003. Speaking up in the operating room: How team leaders promote learning in interdisciplinary action teams. Journal of Management Studies, 40: 1419–1452. Google Scholar
- 1989. Betrayal of trust in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 23: 547–566. Google Scholar
- 1997. Why is a third of your time wasted in meetings? Journal of Management, 16: 672–676. Google Scholar
- 2020. Token female voice enactment in traditionally male-dominated teams: Facilitating conditions and consequences for performance. Academy of Management Journal, 63: 832–856.Link , Google Scholar
- 1991. Participation in heterogeneous and homogeneous groups: A theoretical integration. American Journal of Sociology, 97: 114–142. Google Scholar
- 1993. Controlling other people: The impact of power on stereotying. American Psychologist, 48: 621–628. Google Scholar
- 2003. How much should I give and how often? The effects of generosity and frequency of favor exchange on social status and productivity. Academy of Management Journal, 48: 539–553. Google Scholar
- 2006. Helping one’s way to the top: Self-monitors achieve status by helping others and knowing who helps whom. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91: 1123–1137. Google Scholar
- 2012. Appeasing equals: Lateral deference in organizational communication. Administrative Science Quarterly, 57: 373–406. Google Scholar
- 2007. Relational job design and the motivation to make a prosocial difference. Academy of Management Review, 32: 393–417.Link , Google Scholar
- 2017.
Conflict in teams . In R. RicoE. SalasN. Ashkanasy (Eds.), The Wiley Blackwell handbook of team dynamics, teamwork, and collaborative working: 317–344. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. Google Scholar - 2011. Too many cooks spoil the broth: How high-status individuals decrease group effectiveness. Organization Science, 22: 722–737. Google Scholar
- 2006. Nice guys finish first: The competitive altruism hypothesis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32: 1402–1413. Google Scholar
- 2001. When organizational voice systems fail: More on the deaf-ear syndrome and frustration effects. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 37: 324–342. Google Scholar
- 2020. Toot your own horn? Leader narcissism and the effectiveness of employee self-promotion. Journal of Management, 46: 261–286. Google Scholar
- 2013. Collective engagement in creative tasks: The role of evaluation in the creative process in groups. Administrative Science Quarterly, 58: 346–386. Google Scholar
- 2004. Review essay. Recognition and social theory. Acta Sociologica, 47: 365–373. Google Scholar
- 2005. No credit where credit is due: Attributional rationalization of women’s success in male-female teams. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90: 905–916. Google Scholar
- 2018). Failing at the art of self-promotion can cost you throughout your career. Retrieved from https://finance.yahoo.com/news/failing-art-self-promotion-cost-154346286.html Google Scholar (
- 1970. Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar
- 2015. Who gets credit for input? Demographic and structural status cues in voice recognition. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100: 1765–1784. Google Scholar
- 1999. Preference reversals between joint and separate evaluations of options: A review and theoretical analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 125: 576–590. Google Scholar
- 2017, August). The power of listeners: How listeners transforms status and co-create power. 77th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, Atlanta, GA. Google Scholar (
- 2020. Keeping it between us: Managerial endorsement of public versus private voice. Journal of Applied Psychology. doi: 10.1037/apl0000816 Google Scholar
- 1982.
Toward a general theory of strategic self-presentation . In J. Suls (Ed.), Psychological perspectives on the self, vol. 1: 231–262. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Google Scholar - 2013. From the ephemeral to the enduring: How approach-oriented mindsets lead to greater status. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105: 816–831. Google Scholar
- 2016. Hierarchy and its discontents: Status disagreement leads to withdrawal of contribution and lower group performance. Organization Science, 27: 373–390. Google Scholar
- 2017. lmerTest package: Tests in linear mixed effects models. Journal of Statistical Software, 82: 1–26. Google Scholar
- 1998. Demographic diversity and faultlines: The compositional dynamics of organizational groups. Academy of Management Review, 23: 325–340.Link , Google Scholar
- 2019. Dynamic leadership emergence: Differential impact of members’ and peers’ contributions in the idea generation and idea enactment phases of innovation project teams. Journal of Applied Psychology, 104: 411–432. Google Scholar
- 1998. Predicting voice behavior in work groups. Journal of Applied Psychology, 83: 853–868. Google Scholar
- 2007. What do laboratory experiments measuring social prefences reveal about the real world? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21: 153–174. Google Scholar
- 2017. The content of the message matters: The differential effects of promotive and prohibitive team voice on team productivity and safety performance gains. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102: 1259–1270. Google Scholar
- 2012. Psychologial antecedents of promotive and prohibitive voice: A two-wave examination. Academy of Management Journal, 55: 71–92.Link , Google Scholar
- 2019. Differential implications of team member promotive and prohibitive voice on innovation performance in research and development project teams: A dialectic perspective. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 40: 91–104. Google Scholar
- 2019). sjstats: Statistical functions for regression models (0.17.4). Retrieved from https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=sjstats. Google Scholar (
- 2006. When fit is fundamental: Performance evaluations and promotions of upper-level female and male managers. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91: 777–785. Google Scholar
- 2008. Social hierarchy: The self-reinforcing nature of power and status. Academy of Management Annals, 2: 351–398.Link , Google Scholar
- 2017. Gender stereotypes and venture support decisions: How governmental venture capitalists socially construct entrepreneurs’ potential. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 41: 1–28. Google Scholar
- 2017. Dominance and prestige: A tale of two hierarchies. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26: 526–531. Google Scholar
- 2010. The essential tension between leadership and power: When leaders sacrifice group goals for the sake of self-interest. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99: 482–497. Google Scholar
- 2014. Speaking more broadly: An examination of the nature, antecedents, and consequences of an expanded set of employee voice behaviors. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99: 87–112. Google Scholar
- 2018. The social consequences of voice: An examination of voice type and gender on status and subsequent leader emergence. Academy of Management Journal, 61: 1869–1891.Link , Google Scholar
- 2011. Employee voice behavior: Integration and directions for future research. Academy of Management Annals, 5: 373–412.Link , Google Scholar
- 2014. Employee voice and silence. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1: 173–197. Google Scholar
- 2000. Organizational silence: A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world. Academy of Management Review, 25: 706–725.Link , Google Scholar
- 2014. Innovation in top management teams: Minority dissent, transformational leadership, and radical innovations. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 23: 310–322. Google Scholar
- 2015. Promoting an open research culture. Science, 348: 1422–1425. Google Scholar
- 2015. Social recognition provision patterns in professional Q&A forums in healthcare and construction. Computers in Human Behavior, 55: 571–583. Google Scholar
- 2008. Picking up the gauntlet: How individuals respond to status challenges. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38: 1945–1980. Google Scholar
- 1978. Conformity, group-oriented motivation, and status attainment in small groups. Social Psychology, 41: 175–188. Google Scholar
- 1987. Nonverbal behavior, dominance, and the basis of status in task groups. American Sociological Review, 52: 683–694. Google Scholar
- 2011. Framed by gender: How gender inequality persists in the modern world. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar
- 1986. Expectation, legitimation, and dominance behavior in task groups. American Sociological Review, 51: 603–617. Google Scholar
- 2006. Consensus and the creation of status beliefs. Social Forces, 85: 431–453. Google Scholar
- 2000. Creating and spreading status beliefs. American Journal of Sociology, 106: 579–615. Google Scholar
- 2008. Employee voice and strategic competitive advantage in international modern public corporations—An economic perspective. European Management Journal, 26: 234–246. Google Scholar
- 1998. Self-promotion as a risk factor for women: The costs and benefits of counterstereotypical impression management. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74: 629–645. Google Scholar
- 1978. A social information processing approach to job attitudes and task design. Administrative Science Quarterly, 23: 224–253. Google Scholar
- 2013. Lean-in: Women, work and the will to lead. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Google Scholar
- 2020. The voice cultivation process: How team members can help upward voice live on to implementation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 66: 380–425. Google Scholar
- 2015. You call it “self-exuberance”; I call it “bragging”: Miscalibrated predictions of emotional responses to self-promotion. Psychological Science, 26: 903–914. Google Scholar
- 2001. What do proactive people do? A longitudinal model linking proactive personality and career success. Personnel Psychology, 54: 845–874. Google Scholar
- 2021. Distinguishing voice and silence at work: Unique relationships with perceived impact, psychological safety, and burnout. Academy of Management Journal, 64: 114–148.Link , Google Scholar
- 2018. Centralization of member voice in teams: Its effects on expertise utilization and team performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 103: 813–827. Google Scholar
- 2010. Approaches to social research (5th ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar
- 2008. Exploring nonlinearity in employee voice: The effects of personal control and organizational identification. Academy of Management Journal, 51: 1189–1203.Link , Google Scholar
- 2012. Ask and you shall hear (but not always): An examination of the relationship between manager consultation and employee voice. Personnel Psychology, 65: 251–282. Google Scholar
- 2009. Unpacking the doubt in “beyond a reasonable doubt”: Plausible alternative stories increase not guilty verdicts. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 31: 1–8. Google Scholar
- 2021. Open science and reform practices in organizational behavior research over time (2011 to 2019). Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 162: 218–223. Google Scholar
- 2019. Is overconfidence a social liability? The effect of verbal versus nonverbal expressions of confidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 116: 396–415. Google Scholar
- 1997. Whose expectations matter? The relative power of first-order and second-order expectations in determining social influence. American Journal of Sociology, 103: 692–732. Google Scholar
- 2003. Conceptualizing employee silence and employee voice as multidimensional constructs. Journal of Management Studies, 40: 1359–1392. Google Scholar
- 1995.
Extra-role behaviors: In pursuit of construct and definitional clarity (a bridge over muddied waters) . In L. L. CummingsB. M. Staw (Eds.), Research in organizational behavior, vol. 17: 215–285. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Google Scholar - 1998. Helping and voice extra-role behaviors: Evidence of construct and predictive validity. Academy of Management Journal, 41: 108–119.Link , Google Scholar
- 2015. I will speak up if my voice is socially desirable: A moderated mediating process of promotive versus prohibitive voice. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100: 1641–1652. Google Scholar
- 2018. Speaking up and moving up: How voice can enhance employees’ social status. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 40: 5–19. Google Scholar
- 2012. Effects of message, source, and context on evaluations of employee voice behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97: 159–182. Google Scholar
- 2009. Groups reward individual sacrifice: The status solution to the collective action problem. American Sociological Review, 74: 23–43. Google Scholar
- 1990. Generative processes of comprehension. Educational Psychologist, 24: 345–376. Google Scholar