Case Study 33-2: Who Gets to Speak? Research on Voice, Power, and Upward Communication

Overview

The question that underlies all of Chapter 33 — when and how people in lower-power positions speak up to those with more power — is one of the most extensively researched questions in organizational behavior. The research on voice behavior reveals that the intuitive advice ("just speak up") is insufficient, and that the conditions enabling voice are structural as much as individual. This case study synthesizes the most important research streams: Detert and Burris's foundational work on upward voice, Edmondson's research on psychological safety, and the growing body of work on how race and gender shape whose voices are heard and whose are dismissed.

The Voice Behavior Research: What Actually Enables Upward Communication

Detert and Burris (2007): Implicit Voice Theories

James Detert and Ethan Burris published a foundational study in the Academy of Management Journal examining why employees so often stay silent even when they have information that could improve the organization. Their concept of "implicit voice theories" refers to the beliefs employees hold — often without examining them — about when, how, and to whom it is appropriate to speak up.

They identified several particularly common implicit voice theories that suppress upward communication:

"It is not safe to speak up." The most pervasive. Employees believe that speaking up, even about genuine organizational problems, risks negative consequences: being labeled a troublemaker, being passed over for advancement, facing social ostracism, or outright retaliation. Detert and Burris found that this belief is often accurate — not merely a cognitive distortion — because many organizations do, in fact, punish upward voice implicitly or explicitly.

"It is not worth it to speak up." Employees who have tried to raise concerns before and been ignored, dismissed, or responded to with defensiveness develop a learned helplessness around voice. Even when they have relevant information, they calculate that the effort and risk of speaking are not worth the low probability of being heard.

"Timing is everything and it is never the right time." This implicit theory holds that there is a right moment for raising concerns, and that moment somehow never arrives. It functions as a sophisticated procrastination mechanism, particularly for issues that require speaking to high-status superiors.

"My manager needs to feel in control." Employees believe (often correctly) that their superior needs to feel that they are in command of their domain, and that any information suggesting the superior has missed something will be received as a challenge to their authority rather than as useful information.

Detert and Burris found that managerial behavior was the primary predictor of employee voice — not employee personality or communication skills. Managers who were open to challenge, who modeled intellectual humility, and who responded non-defensively to concerns created conditions where voice was possible. Managers who responded to concerns with defensiveness, dismissal, or subtle punishment systematically silenced their teams.

The implications for this textbook: individual confrontation skills matter, but they operate in conditions created by the manager. Priya's confrontation with Harmon is harder not because she lacks skill but because Harmon's historical behavior has established a context in which speaking up is costly. The chapter's acknowledgment that "skill alone cannot compensate for severe structural power imbalance" is consistent with the research.

What Enables Upward Voice

Detert and Burris also identified conditions that increase the probability of upward voice:

Managerial openness: When employees believe their manager will genuinely consider their input, voice increases substantially. This is less about whether the manager agrees and more about whether the concern will be engaged with rather than dismissed.

Status and organizational standing: Higher-status employees speak up more. This is partly because they have more referent power and can afford the social cost of speaking, and partly because they have been culturally selected for assertive communication. This creates an uncomfortable reality: the employees who have the most new information are often lower-status (newer, more junior, less entrenched in existing ways of thinking), but they are also the least likely to speak up.

Prior successful voice experiences: Employees who have raised concerns before and experienced genuine engagement — not necessarily agreement, but engagement — are more likely to raise concerns again. Organizations that systematically shut down upward voice lose the benefit of subsequent voice from even the most motivated employees.

Seeing that others have spoken up successfully: Social proof of voice matters. Employees watch what happens when others raise concerns. If they see colleagues punished for speaking up, they stay silent. If they see concerns received professionally and engaged with seriously, they become more likely to speak.

Edmondson: Psychological Safety as the Enabling Condition

Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety (1999, 2003, 2018) provides perhaps the most influential framework for understanding when voice is possible. Psychological safety, as Edmondson defines it, is "a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking."

This is a team-level construct, not an individual trait. It is the degree to which people on a team believe they can speak up with ideas, concerns, questions, or mistakes without being humiliated, ignored, or punished. It is not the same as comfort — high-performing teams with high psychological safety often have vigorous disagreements. The difference is that team members feel safe engaging, not that they feel safe from challenge.

Edmondson's landmark study of hospital teams (1999) found that teams with higher psychological safety reported more errors than teams with lower safety — but performed better. This counterintuitive finding revealed that high-safety teams were catching and correcting errors that low-safety teams were suppressing. The low-safety teams were not making fewer errors; they were making the same errors and hiding them, which ultimately produced worse patient outcomes.

The hospital context makes this research directly relevant to Dr. Priya Okafor's situation. In Hargrove University Hospital, the degree of psychological safety on the team and in the department shapes what conversations are possible. If the culture around Harmon's service has established that challenging his decisions carries consequences, every physician on that service operates in reduced psychological safety — and patient care suffers.

Edmondson identifies three conditions that leaders create that determine psychological safety:

Framing work as a learning problem rather than an execution problem. Leaders who signal that they expect uncertainty, that mistakes will occur, and that information-sharing improves outcomes create higher safety than leaders who signal that performance expectations are fixed and deviation is failure.

Acknowledging their own fallibility. Leaders who model intellectual humility — who say "I might be wrong about this" or "I want to hear what I'm missing" — create much higher psychological safety than leaders who project infallibility.

Genuine curiosity about others' perspectives. Not performative consultation, but actual interest in what people at different positions and with different information see. This is harder than it sounds for leaders who are skilled, experienced, and often correct in their initial assessments — their track record can paradoxically make them less safe for their teams.

For the individual preparing to confront upward: psychological safety is something you read (is this a high-safety or low-safety environment?) and also something you can partially create through how you open the conversation. Priya's problem-solving framing is, in part, an attempt to create a micro-environment of safety for the conversation — to establish conditions in which Harmon can engage with the concern without losing face.

Race, Gender, and the Conditions of Voice

The research on psychological safety and voice behavior has largely examined teams and organizations without fully accounting for the ways that race and gender shape who can access voice in the first place. A growing body of research addresses this gap, with findings that are both consistent and disquieting.

The Research on Whose Voices Are Heard

Speaking up while Black: Ashleigh Shelby Rosette and colleagues have extensively documented the double bind facing Black women in organizational contexts. They face the "Angry Black Woman" stereotype when they are assertive or direct, and they face the "passive/non-leadership" stereotype when they are not. This double bind creates a narrow and exhausting corridor of acceptable expression — one that white employees and male employees do not navigate in the same way.

A study by Rosette and Livingston (2012) on "threatened white majority groups" found that Black women in particular faced an asymmetric disadvantage: when they succeeded, it was more likely to be attributed to luck or token selection; when they failed, it was more readily used as evidence of unsuitability. This asymmetry is directly relevant to how voice is received: a Black woman who raises a concern that turns out to be correct may not receive credit in the same way a white male colleague would; a Black woman whose concern is ultimately deemed incorrect may face more lasting reputational damage.

The gender-voice gap in meetings: Research across organizational contexts consistently finds that women speak less than men in mixed-gender meetings, and when they do speak, are interrupted more frequently and have their ideas credited to others at higher rates (a phenomenon some researchers call "hepeating" — when a woman's idea is ignored and then credited to the male colleague who repeats it). Women are also more likely to be evaluated negatively for the same assertive communication that earns men positive evaluations (the "double standard for competence" documented by Brescoll and Uhlmann, 2008).

Intersectionality and the compounding effect: The research of Crenshaw (1989) and subsequent scholars demonstrates that the disadvantages associated with race and gender are not simply additive — they interact in ways that create qualitatively different experiences. Black women do not simply face the disadvantages of being Black plus the disadvantages of being a woman; they face a distinct set of challenges that neither "Black" nor "woman" captures alone. For upward voice, this means that the costs and risks of speaking up are, on average, higher for Black women than for any other demographic group in most organizational contexts.

What Individuals Can Do — And What Organizations Must Do

The research suggests a clear division of labor between individual strategies and organizational responsibility.

What individuals can do:

Build referent power deliberately. Research shows that individuals who have established trust, credibility, and relationship quality with decision-makers have more latitude to raise challenging concerns. This is not "work around racism" advice — it is an honest observation that referent power partially offsets the disadvantages of lower positional power and protects against the worst of the interpretive biases.
Choose timing and setting strategically. Raising concerns in private settings where the more-powerful person does not have to defend their ego publicly reduces defensiveness. Raising concerns when the person is in a reflective rather than defensive mode increases reception.
Document and make concerns visible. Priya's documentation is not just a confrontation strategy; it is a protection strategy. When concerns are documented, the organization cannot easily pretend they were not raised.
Build coalitions. The research on collective voice suggests that concerns raised by groups are significantly harder to dismiss than concerns raised by individuals. This is especially true for individuals from marginalized groups, where an individual's concern can be more easily attributed to personal grievance.

What organizations must do:

The research is unambiguous that individual strategies have limits, and that the structural conditions enabling or suppressing voice are the organization's responsibility, not the individual's. Organizations that want genuine upward voice must:

Create anonymous reporting mechanisms with genuine anonymity
Train leaders in psychological safety creation as a skill
Monitor patterns of whose voices are heard, credited, and acted upon — disaggregated by race, gender, and other identity dimensions
Create structural consequences for retaliation against upward voice
Actively solicit input from lower-status, newer, and demographically underrepresented employees — not as tokenism but as recognition that information is distributed across the organization, not concentrated at the top

Edmondson's research makes the business case: organizations with higher psychological safety perform better, catch errors faster, and adapt more effectively to changing conditions. The diversity of voice — making it safe for all employees to raise concerns, not just those who are most similar to leadership — is a performance asset, not merely a social justice imperative.

Application: Returning to Priya

Dr. Priya Okafor's situation sits exactly at the intersection of the research streams reviewed here. She faces:

An implicit voice theory context where historical dynamics have made upward challenge costly
A low-psychological-safety environment with respect to challenging Dr. Harmon specifically
The compound disadvantage of race and gender in a predominantly white institution
Real informational power (her documentation) and real referent power (her eight-year track record)

The research predicts that her confrontation will face resistance — not necessarily because Harmon is consciously determined to suppress her voice, but because the structural conditions do not automatically reward honest upward challenge. It also predicts that her combination of documentation, relationship-building, and solution-orientation are the most effective individual strategies available to her.

What the research cannot predict is what Harmon will actually do. Whether he has the intellectual honesty and institutional courage to respond to her concern genuinely — rather than dismissively or defensively — depends on his character and, importantly, on the organizational culture that has shaped him. That is not entirely within her control.

What is within her control is preparation, strategy, documentation, coalition, and the willingness to escalate through formal channels if direct conversation fails. She has done all of these. The rest, as Detert and Burris's research would predict, depends heavily on conditions she did not create.

Discussion Questions

Detert and Burris found that managerial behavior, not employee personality, is the primary predictor of upward voice. What are the implications of this finding for how organizations should be designed? What are the implications for how we teach confrontation skills to individuals?
Edmondson found that high-performing teams with high psychological safety reported more errors than low-safety teams. Explain this counterintuitive finding and its implications for the relationship between safety and performance.
The research on race and gender in organizational voice is not comfortable reading for members of dominant groups in organizations. How should organizations present this research to mixed-race, mixed-gender audiences without either minimizing the findings or creating defensiveness that prevents engagement?
The chapter argues that individual confrontation strategies have real limits when structural power imbalances are severe. Does the research support this claim? What would you say to someone who argues that "anyone can speak up if they do it skillfully"?
What would an organization look like if it genuinely implemented the organizational changes the research recommends? What barriers exist to implementing those changes, and why do most organizations not implement them even when leaders claim to value voice?

Key Research Referenced

Detert, J. R., & Burris, E. R. (2007). Leadership behavior and employee voice: Is the door really open? Academy of Management Journal, 50(4), 869–884.
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley.
Rosette, A. S., & Livingston, R. W. (2012). Failure is not an option for Black women: Effects of organizational performance on leaders with single versus dual-subordinate identities. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(5), 1162–1167.
Brescoll, V. L., & Uhlmann, E. L. (2008). Can an angry woman get ahead? Status conferral, gender, and expression of emotion in the workplace. Psychological Science, 19(3), 268–275.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, 139–167.