Employee Voice and the Digitalisation of Work

Abstract

Over the past four decades, scholars from employment relations, human resource management, organisational behaviour and labour economics have published a vast body of literature concerning employee voice (Wilkinson & Fay, 2011). Employee voice is thereby understood as the opportunity to participate in organisational decisionmaking and to have a say to influence the own work and the interests of managers and owners (Barry &Wilkinson, 2016) or – in the case of employee silence – to withhold these views and concerns (Morrison & Milliken, 2003). Employee voice and silence have been linked to organisational performance and the development of competitive advantage (Barry & Wilkinson, 2016) and are a key ingredient for the positive relationship between strategic human resource management and organisational performance (Wood & Wall, 2007) which also implies a link between employee voice and innovation. Employees with the opportunity to communicate individual ideas to management and to participate in decision-making give them the possibility to express ‘creative ideas and new perspectives, increasing the likelihood of innovation’ (Grant, 2013, p. 1703; Zhou & George, 2001).