A Story About Speaking Up: Mediation Effects of Narrative Persuasion on Organizational Voice Intentions

Despite well-recognized organizational benefits when speaking up is normative employee behavior, employees often remain reluctant to speak up in organizational settings. To date, strategies to promote speaking up have largely focused on policy and environmental factors, with scant attention paid to development of successful promotional messages. To explore message strategies for promoting speaking up, we randomly assigned participants (N = 615) to four different message conditions and measured their voice intentions. Persuasive strategies incorporating storytelling were more effective in promoting speaking up than strategies without the storytelling component, with narrative transportation as a mediating factor. Transportation effects were inversely correlated with need for cognition and work engagement, suggesting the utility of story-based message strategies for impacting employees most likely to resist speaking up. This study contributes to the field as one of the first to connect the mechanisms of narrative persuasion to the effectiveness of storytelling in organizational communication.