Employee voice at work: the role of employees’ gender,self-efficacy beliefs,and leadership

ABSTRACT

Building on social role theory, we investigated the association between gender and employee voice (employees’ speaking up in a challenging but constructive way about work-related issues) in a typically male-dominated sector. In two field studies in the logistics context, we tested how and when gender is related to employee voice. In Study 1 (N = 132), we examined whether the gender-voice association is mediated by general self-efficacy beliefs. In Study 2 (N = 99), we replicated the indirect effect of gender on employee voice via general self-efficacy beliefs and investigated whether this indirect effect is contingent on supportive leadership. Using path analytical procedures, we found a significant indirect effect moderated by supportive leadership: At low and medium levels of supportive leadership, women reported less self-efficacy than men, which in turn resulted in less voice. At high levels of supportive leadership, the indirect effect was nonsignificant. Our studies contribute to research on the mechanisms and boundary conditions of gender’s influence in the employee voice process and have practical implications for leaders in male-dominated working contexts who want to encourage their female employees to speak up about work-related issues.     

CASH only: Constitutive autonomy through motorsensory self-programming

Constitutive autonomy is the capacity of an entity to perpetually develop its individual constitution and coupling with its environment. We argue that computational entities (i.e., entities that can perform computation) can gain constitutive autonomy through motorsensory self-programming – a mechanism by which the entity acquires new computational processes as a series of patterns of interaction that the entity can learn through experience, simulate internally, and enact in the environment. Motorsensory self-programming allows the evolution of the cognitive coupling between the entity’s behavior selection mechanism and the environment as it appears from the viewpoint of the behavior selection mechanism. Constitutive autonomy of computational entities could lead to genuine agency.