Cooperative Voice And Cooperative Silence: Face-To Face Communication

The study by Wang et al. (2011) is based on the idea that silence is not necessarily the opposite or absence of voice; employees may either withhold or express work-related ideas, information, and opinions based on the same motive. This multidimensional view suggests that one specific leadership style is able and likely to simultaneously promote cooperative voice and cooperative silence based on the same motives. Both voice and silence are purposeful forms of face-to-face communication; the absence of voice does not necessarily imply the presence of intentional silence. Therefore, cooperative voice and cooperative silence both involve conscious or intentional decision making, and represent distinct constructs rather than two opposite poles of the same concept. In this study, Wang et al. (2011) treat cooperative voice and cooperative silence as distinct constructs and examine whether the same leadership style can elicit both types of follower behavior.

The researchers posit that group focused transformational leadership is positively related to both cooperative voice and cooperative silence through the mediation of followers’ perceptions of value congruence between leaders and followers. Wang et al. (2011) hypothesized that followers whose values are

A human resource officer in the headquarters of the banking organization identified 55 bank branch managers or department managers with similar levels of responsibility and a similar number of direct reports. Managers who had been in their roles for less than three months were excluded from the study. The human resource officer then randomly selected four direct reports of each sampled manager (208 subordinates in total) as followers in this study. The researchers sent surveys to the sampled subordinates, and completed surveys were directly returned to the researchers by mail. In total, 193 surveys were