The Social Aftershocks of Voice: An Investigation of Employees’ Affective and Interpersonal Reactions after Speaking Up

Abstract

We draw on cognitive-motivational-relational theory to build a theoretical model outlining how speaking up affects voicers’ emotions and subsequent social behavior. Across three studies—an experimental pilot study, a daily within-person study of employee–coworker dyads, and a preregistered experiment—we test our proposal that promotive voice elicits pride due to a sense of social accomplishment, whereas prohibitive voice elicits anxiety due to a sense of social uncertainty. We demonstrate that these feelings of pride and anxiety have diverging effects on voicers’ tendency to withdraw from social interaction during the rest of the day. In turn, these diverging effects on voicers’ interpersonal avoidance influence voicers’ daily interpersonal citizenship behaviors. We further propose that recipients of voice have the potential to “hijack” voicers’ affective appraisals in a manner that can amplify or attenuate their emotional reactions and subsequent social behavior. Our results disentangle the complex experience of speaking up and provide novel insights into how voicers and organizations can maximize the benefits of voice while minimizing its harmful social side effects.