Employee voice and organizational performance: Team versus representative influence

Abstract

This article explores the effects of team voice and worker representative voice, as well as their interaction, on labor productivity. We examine team voice in terms of team influence on key work-related issues and representative voice via the degree of worker representatives’ influence on multiple collective voice issues. We thus build on the European tradition of examining both direct and indirect voice and their implications for valued organizational outcomes. We find that neither type of voice bears a significant relationship to labor productivity when examined solely but that team voice significantly contributes to enhanced worker efficiency when considered in conjunction with representative voice. In examining the interaction of the two types of voice, we find that a combination of low team and low representative voice leads to inferior labor efficiency compared to other conditions. We also find a negative interaction between team voice and worker representative voice, supporting an interpretation that these types of voice do not complement each other with respect to worker productivity. The positive impact of each type of voice is significantly stronger at low levels of the other type of voice.