Subrahmaniam Tangirala

• University of Maryland, College Park

We offer a relational perspective on how power shapes voice in the employee–manager dyad. We argue that to properly understand the impact of employees’ power on voice, it must be analyzed alongside the power held by their managers. We propose that although voice increases when employees hold high power, its form—whether constructive or destructive—...

We posit that time significantly impacts how voice—members' expression of work‐related ideas—becomes unequally distributed within teams. Building upon insights from expectation states theory (EST), we propose that over time, voice becomes more centralized in teams, especially around members who are more competent than others. Moreover, we argue tha...

Organizations often need to deal with ambiguous threats, which are complex, unprecedented, and difficult-to-predict events that hold the potential to cause harm. Drawing on the attention-based view of work behavior, we propose that employees do not always remain vigilant to such threats. Consequently, we argue that, in the face of those threats, em...

We challenge the predominant viewpoint in the literature that employee silence is inherently harmful. We theorize that employees can engage in strategic silence, or the intentional withholding of untimely ideas or concerns, in order to raise issues that resonate better with managers when they do speak up. More specifically, we propose that employee...

Background: Prior research has found that adverse events have significant negative consequences for the patients (first victim) and caregivers (second victim) involved such as burnout. However, research has yet to examine the consequences of adverse events on members of caregiving units. We also lack research on the effects of the personal and job...

This special issue introduces new directions for exploring the consequences of proactive behaviors. The authors summarize the new scopes of consequences, new social contexts, and new methods in this exploration. They also identify several limitations of the existing literature and call for more future research in this stream.

We propose that promotive voice, or the expression of suggestions for improving work practices in the organization, and prohibitive voice, or the expression of warnings about factors that can harm the organization, are differentially influenced by employees’ dispositional inclination to be approach and avoidance oriented. Drawing on multisource sur...

Employees often assess whether the social context is favorable for them to speak out, yet little research has investigated how the target's mood might influence the actor's voice behavior. From an affect-as-social-information perspective, we explored such potential effects of the target's mood on the actor's promotive voice in 2 empirical studies....

Using approach and avoidance orientation as the overarching framework, we propose that employees’ promotive and prohibitive voice has contrasting relationship with the traits of performance prove goal orientation, desire to show one’s competence during task engagement and performance avoid goal orientation, fear of coming across as incompetent when...

Using role theory as the overarching framework, we propose that employees' voice has contrasting relationships with the traits of duty orientation, or employees' dispositional sense of moral and ethical obligation at the workplace, and achievement orientation, or the extent of their ingrained personal ambition to get ahead professionally. Using dat...

We investigated how employees can, simultaneously, speak up to leaders at different levels of the organizational hierarchy. In particular, we examined 2 targets of employees' upward voice on work-related issues: the direct leader (i.e., the supervisor) and the skip-level leader (i.e., supervisor's boss). Drawing on emerging research on the socially...

The literature on employees’ voice is characterized by 2 influential perspectives on its antecedents—1 that focuses on the importance of managerial behaviors and the other that emphasizes the role of employees’ internal motivational states. In this study, we integrate these perspectives and examine the proposition that (a key managerial behavior) c...

Using Hollander's (1958) idiosyncrasy credit theory of leadership as the theoretical backdrop, we examined when and why organizational leaders escape punitive evaluation for their organizational transgressions. In a sample of 162 full-time employees, we found that leaders who were perceived to be more able and inspirationally motivating were less p...

Departing from the emphasis on individual-level stress processes in prior expatriate research, we develop a multilevel model of expatriate "cross-cultural motivation and effectiveness" (motivation and effectiveness pertaining to cross-cultural contexts) that incorporates the influences of foreign subsidiary-level attributes. Analyses of multi-sourc...

We examined the proposition that employees' work-flow centrality (i.e., the extent to which they are critical to the task-related interaction networks of their work groups) enhances their personal influence within their work groups and, therefore, motivates them to engage in voice behaviors. In support of this proposition, in a study of 184 bank em...

This study examined the cross-level effects of procedural justice climate on employee silence—that is, the intentional withholding of critical work-related information by employees from their workgroup members. In a survey-based study of 606 nurses nested within 30 workgroups, we found that procedural justice climate moderated the effects of indivi...

Dyadic relationships in an organizational hierarchy are often nested within one another. For instance, the relationship between a supervisor and an employee is nested within the relationship between that supervisor and his or her boss. In that context, the authors propose that the supervisor's relationship with his or her boss (leader–leader exchan...

We use uncertainty management theory (Lind & Van den Bos, 2002) as a framework to examine how the members of computer-mediated groups differ from those of face-to-face groups in their reactions to unfair events. Due to informational uncertainty surrounding interpersonal interactions in computer-mediated groups, fairness from authorities is more sal...

This article examines the relationship of employee perceptions of information privacy in their work organizations and important psychological and behavioral outcomes. A model is presented in which information privacy predicts psychological empowerment, which in turn predicts discretionary behaviors on the job, including creative performance and org...