Effects of Technology-Enabled Flexible Work Arrangements on Employee Voice: Toward a Nuanced Understanding

Abstract

Flexible work arrangements that are enabled by digital technologies, such as telecommuting and virtual teams, are proposed to increase employees', teams', and organisations' ability to accomplish their aims in dynamic and ambiguous environments. Effective communication is essential in such work arrangements. Distribution of work across time and space and reliance on technology-mediation may interfere with employees' willingness and ability to address critical issues (i.e., employee voice), such as providing ideas for improvement, raising inefficacy and safety concerns, and reporting errors and unethical practices. Addressing this concern, we first elaborate on potential models of the relationship between technology-enabled flexible work arrangements and voice. Specifically, we describe an evolution from overly social or technical deterministic approaches that propose direct effects of digital technologies or flexible work arrangements on voice to a socio-material approach. The latter allows considering how affordances and constraints of digital technologies and user goals and capabilities form flexible work arrangements, which, in turn, relate to motivators and inhibitors of employee voice. While evolving toward a nuanced understanding, we draw from a process model of voice and develop exemplary propositions for how technologically-enabled work arrangements relate to voice success factors when employees pass through the stages of this process.