Employees’ voice plays a crucial role in the effective functioning of organizations and their units. However, there are many instances where employees’ voices are not given proper attention or even ignored. In response, employees are forming voice coalitions with an attempt to amplify the impact of their voice as well as disperse personal risks. Integrating theory of power-dependence and rules of responsibility dispersion, we propose that while voicing in coalition may improve the likelihood of voice endorsement, voicers in the coalition may, not evenly, incur managerial retaliation. We demonstrate these effects in a randomized field experiment using the critical incident method. Results showed that with an increase in the number of voicers in the coalition, on the one hand, leaders perceived greater importance of the voice and subsequently more likely endorsed the voice; on the other hand, leaders perceived stronger threat and subsequently imposed more managerial retaliation against the voicers, especially the voicers with lower power. Our findings highlight the effectiveness as well as backlash of voicing in coalitions (i.e., increasing the number of voicers when expressing voice) and the decoupling consequences of voicing (i.e., voice being heeded while voicers being hurt).
