Are You Stifling Employee Voice?

When asked why she had chosen to share her idea with her supervisor, a government employee whom I'll call Chantal (all research subjects featured in this article have pseudonyms) thought about the question for a few seconds. Finally, she smiled, and the truth came out: "His leadership style when it came to me, from the very beginning, I felt he was my cheerleader. He thought I had great ideas." Conversely, when she later pondered a job in which she had not taken her ideas forward to leadership, she described a different environment. "I don't feel like anything would be done \[with my suggestions\] since my peers had already tried to get upward mobility through sharing their own," she explained. "And, I never said anything. At one point, I started looking for a job, then I would stop. The morale was bad at that point. I wasn't coming to work happy every day and just treated the job as something that needed to get done."