School of Management and Labour Relation Rutgers U., United States
Drawing insights from the dual-processing theory, employee voice entails both deliberate processes and intuitive ones. While traditional voice literature has mostly viewed employee voice as a rational, cost-benefit analysis, the role of intuition in voice behaviors is largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, our theory proposes that deliberate voice, due to its well-thought-out and organized nature, positively impacts individual creativity through obtaining supervisory responsiveness, whereas intuitive voice may provide more rapid but less refined suggestions, often leading to less individual creativity due to less supervisory responsiveness. However, this negative association can be mitigated by occupying voice network centrality, enhancing the voice credibility and visibility. Although intuitive voice might be less effective at the individual level, we further propose that its benefits accrue more at the team level, especially when team improvisation is high. In other words, when the team requires swift coordination, team members’ collective intuitive voice is positively related to team adaptive performance. Through a pilot study, a survey involving 711 individual employees, and another survey involving 294 teams in the restaurant industry in China, our results largely support our predictions at both the individual and team levels. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
