Abstract:

Employee voice is widely recognised as essential to employee wellbeing, innovation, ethical leadership, and organisational effectiveness. Yet, despite extensive research on why employees speak up and how organisations respond, a persistent puzzle remains: employees frequently raise issues that are acknowledged but not acted upon, deferred, procedurally contained, or rendered irrelevant. This paper argues that existing approaches, whether centred on individual behaviours or formal voice mechanisms, struggle to explain this recurring pattern because they conceptualise voice as an act that precedes organisational interpretation. In contrast, we advance a practice‑based perspective that reconceptualises employee voice as a situated organisational accomplishment shaped through practices of recognition. Drawing on Orlikowski’s practice lens, we distinguish between voicing (the act of speaking up) and voice (what becomes recognised as legitimate and consequential within organisational routines). Through this lens, organisational procedures such as agenda setting, turn‑taking, minuting, categorising issues, and routing concerns do not merely respond to voice; they actively construct it. These practices can enable contributions to become actionable or produce a neutralised voice, wherein issues are acknowledged yet stripped of influence. This perspective highlights how power, hierarchy, and norms operate through mundane organisational routines to shape whose contributions matter. By shifting analytical attention from expression to enactment, this reconceptualisation provides a shared framework for organisational behaviour and employment relations scholarship. It also opens new avenues for empirical research on how voice is constituted, neutralised, or transformed through everyday organisational practices, and how these dynamics intersect with inclusion, identity, and organisational change.

Please choose your submission type: Developmental Paper

Primary Track: Practice Theory

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Dr. Senia Kalfa