Centralization of member voice in teams: Its effects on expertise utilization and team performance.

What is it about?

When employees candidly speak up at work with their ideas, concerns, or opinions, their teams can become better at detecting and responding to problems and opportunities in the environment. Not surprisingly, strategies for encouraging employees’ voice have, of late, become a frequent topic for discussion for leaders. Yet, although leaders can create abundant opportunities for employees to speak up, not all employees equally use those opportunities. Rather, often, one or two individuals in the team can usurp a disproportionate amount of “air time” while the others silently standby. Unequal airtime for employees can prevent the surfacing of diverse viewpoints, which are crucial for teams trying to make sense of their complex environment. It can make teams excessively reliant on a mere sub-set of employees and become collectively less intelligent. Yet, is that always the case? In this paper, we investigated how the “distribution” of voice amongst employees can impact team effectiveness. We found that teams in which employees had unequal speaking times suffered adverse outcomes only when employees who tend to speak more than their teammates also were driven by a need for social dominance, characterized by excessive assertiveness or attention seeking. In contrast, when employee who speak up more than their teammates were driven by a reflective mentality, characterized by self-discipline and deliberativeness, the teams escape the worst and perform as well as teams that have egalitarian speaking patterns.

Featured Image