Volume 97, Issue 4 pp. 1854-1873
REGISTERED REPORT STAGE 2

Turning down employee voice with humour: A mixed blessing for employee voice resilience?

Melvyn R. W. Hamstra

Melvyn R. W. Hamstra

IESEG School of Management, UMR 9221 – LEM – Lille Économie Management, Lille, France

Univ. Lille, UMR 9221 – LEM – Lille Économie Management, Lille, France

CNRS, UMR 9221 – LEM – Lille Économie Management, Lille, France

Contribution: Conceptualization, ​Investigation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Methodology, Software, Data curation, Formal analysis

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Felipe A. Guzman

Felipe A. Guzman

IESEG School of Management, UMR 9221 – LEM – Lille Économie Management, Lille, France

Univ. Lille, UMR 9221 – LEM – Lille Économie Management, Lille, France

CNRS, UMR 9221 – LEM – Lille Économie Management, Lille, France

Contribution: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing, Methodology, Software, ​Investigation, Writing - original draft, Formal analysis, Visualization, Data curation

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Si Qian

Corresponding Author

Si Qian

School of Business, Beijing Technology and Business University, Beijing, China

Correspondence

Si Qian, School of Business, Beijing Technology and Business University, Beijing 100048, China.

Email: [email protected]

Contribution: Conceptualization, Writing - original draft, Methodology

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Bert Schreurs

Bert Schreurs

Department of Business, Faculty of Social Sciences and Solvay Business School, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

Contribution: Writing - original draft, Supervision, Resources, Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - review & editing

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I. M. (Jim) Jawahar

I. M. (Jim) Jawahar

Department of Management, Anderson School of Management, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

Contribution: Supervision, Conceptualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing

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First published: 02 July 2024
Citations: 3

Melvyn R. W. Hamstra and Felipe A. Guzman contributed equally to this work.

Abstract

Given that not all suggestions can be implemented, understanding how supervisors can turn down employee voiced suggestions while not discouraging employees voicing in the future is critical for theoretical and practical reasons. Supervisors may use humour when not endorsing employees' suggestions as they attempt to ease tension by injecting something lighthearted, but doing so, we argue, is not uniformly beneficial. Hence, we conducted a preregistered study that tests how supervisors' use of humour when turning down an employee's voiced suggestion affects voice resilience. Utilizing signaling theory, we theorize supervisors' use of humour when turning down voice strengthens voice safety but weakens voice impact perceptions. Indirectly, humour therefore may constitute a mixed blessing for voice resilience (voice behaviour after voice non-endorsement). Additionally, we hypothesized that the positive link between humour and voice safety and the negative link between humour and voice impact are moderated by supervisor–employee relationship quality (leader–member exchange (LMX)). We tested these predictions in a time-lagged study of 343 employees whose voice was recently turned down. Humour indeed increased voice resilience via voice safety; against expectations, humour positively related to voice impact (via it, resilience). LMX is significantly moderated. However, unexpectedly, humour helped voice safety, impact and the resilience of low LMX employees.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The data are available in the OSF files linked within the paper.