دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله شبکه های اجتماعی و صدای کارمند – الزویر ۲۰۱۶

شبکه های اجتماعی و صدای کارمند: تاثیر موقعیت های شبکه اجتماعی رهبران تیم و اعضای تیم بر روی صدای کارمند

Social networks and employee voice: The influence of team members’ and team leaders’ social network positions on employee voice

Abstract

We examine the role of employees’ and team leaders’ social network positions, an important, yet understudied class of variables, in affecting employees’ voice behaviors. Using multi-level, multi-source data from 185 employees nested within 43 teams and their team leaders, we find that employees who hold central positions in the formal, workflow network in the team are more likely to speak up with ideas and suggestions. This relationship is weakened when they are central to the team’s avoidance network. In addition to employees’ own network positions, team leaders’ positions in such informal networks also play a role in qualifying the employee workflow centrality–voice relationship. Specifically, the positive relationship between employees’ workflow centrality and their voice is strengthened when their team leaders occupy central positions in the friendship network, but is weakened when they are central to the avoidance network in the team. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

۱ Introduction

Employee voice – the expression of challenging but constructive opinions, concerns, or ideas about work-related issues (Detert & Burris, 2007; Tangirala & Ramanujam, 2008; Van Dyne & LePine, 1998; Whiting, Maynes, Podsakoff, & Podsakoff, 2012) – has been increasingly recognized as a critical input affecting organizational functioning and well-being (Edmondson, 2003; Morrison & Milliken, 2000). In understanding this phenomenon, prior research has shown employee voice to be affected by a variety of factors such as employees’ personal attributes (e.g., Crant, Kim, & Wang, 2010; LePine & Van Dyne, 2001), perceptions about and attitudes toward the organization (Fuller et al., 2006; Liang, Farh, & Farh, 2012; Tangirala & Ramanujam, 2008) and the behaviors of leaders (Detert & Burris, 2007; Liu, Zhu, & Yang, 2010; Tangirala & Ramanujam, 2012). Although this prior research has made considerable progress, one important area that has, surprisingly, gone largely unexplored relates to the ‘‘effects of one’s colleagues and relationships with one’s colleagues on the decision of whether to engage in voice” (Morrison, 2014, p. 191). Employee voice inherently challenges the status quo and points to needs for changing or improving processes and procedures that may have been instituted by other team members or the team leader and might potentially affect others’ work. As a result, speaking up with one’s concerns and ideas may entail substantial risk for employees (Milliken, Morrison, & Hewlin, 2003; Van Dyne & LePine, 1998) unless they also have supportive relationships with their coworkers and leaders and know that speaking up is viewed as appropriate by them. Thus, the study of employee voice would be quite incomplete without understanding how social and relational factors at work may influence such behaviors. In addressing this gap, the current paper uses a relational, social network framework in examining how employees’ and their leaders’ formal and informal relationships at work may impact employee voice. Compared to most other research in the social sciences (including that of employee voice) that takes an atomistic or ‘‘individual as an independent entity” perspective (i.e., focusing on individual attributes such as personality traits), network theory argues that an individual’s behaviors (such as voice) can be best understood by taking a relational perspective (i.e., studying the nature of individuals’ dyadic relationships and structural positions in the network of such relationships; Borgatti, Brass, & Halgin, 2014). This is because interconnected social relationships strongly shape an individual’s immediate environment by constraining or providing access to social and other resources that are unequally distributed in the social system, and that are beyond the effects of their individual attributes, such as dispositions, alone (e.g., Borgatti et al., 2014; Lin, 1982, 2001; Wellman, 1988). For example, employees’ workgroup identification, an individual attribute, has been shown to be important for employee voice (Tangirala & Ramanujam, 2008). However, regardless of identification levels, an employee who does not have many friends in the team may still feel constrained in openly challenging the status quo or voicing concerns or ideas, potentially because the employee may feel that other team members may not attach credibility to his/her ideas and therefore, would not support him/her. Thus, studying the effects of employees’ positions in formal and informal relationship networks with coworkers adds a layer of richness and complexity to our understanding of employee voice in terms of highlighting situational opportunities and constraints beyond the effects of individual attributes and leader behaviors that have been the focus of prior voice research. In examining the effects of such workplace relationships, we first examine how an employee’s central position (e.g., connecting and mediating unconnected parts of the team; Freeman, 1979) in the formal workflow network, which exposes them to diverse aspects of the team’s work practices, is related to their voice (e.g., Venkataramani & Tangirala, 2010). However, being central in workflow network may not be sufficient unless such ideas are welcomed and supported by the broader team. Following Morrison’s (2014) call, we go beyond merely work related interactions and also examine how employees’ positions in the workflow interact with their positions in the informal positive and negative social networks in the team (i.e., friendship and avoidance networks). In doing so, we use social resources theory (Lin, 2001) as our underlying theoretical framework. Social resources theory argues that in addition to informational resources, network relationships provide access to social resources such as support, signal credibility to others and provide cues about the appropriateness of certain behaviors. Along these lines, we focus on friendship and avoidance networks because they form the understructure of most organizations and capture employees’ access (or lack thereof) to important social resources outside of the formal work structure (Brass, Galaskiewicz, Greve, & Tsai, 2004; Chua, Ingram, & Morris, 2008; Labianca & Brass, 2006; Venkataramani & Dalal, 2007), which can be critical factors influencing employees’ voice. Further, given the important role of leaders in facilitating (or inhibiting) employee voice (Burris, 2012; Detert & Treviño, 2010) and recent research that highlights the benefits of leaders’ embeddedness in their team’s informal social networks (e.g., Mehra, Dixon, Brass, & Robertson, 2006; Venkataramani, Richter, & Clarke, 2014), we also examine how leaders’ positions in friendship and avoidance networks impact the relationship between employees’ workflow centrality and their voice, beyond the effects of employees’ own network positions. Fig. 1 illustrates our theoretical model. The relational, network perspective we take in this study offers some important and unique insights into the employee voice literature beyond that of past research. First, as discussed above, taking a relational perspective highlights the fact that voice is not an isolated behavior driven solely by individual attributes, but is embedded in, and influenced by, an interconnected social structure of other relationships. Relatedly, this perspective illustrates how variations in access to scarce resources through social networks can provide opportunities and constraints beyond the effects of individual characteristics in affecting behavior (Wellman, 1988).