He Who Has Ears, Let Him Hear - Building the Candid Organization from the Bottom Up

Abstract: The interest in employee voice is currently on the rise, specifically because of its potential to improve organizational performance in an increasingly competitive world. Nonetheless, it is a fact that employees more often than not decide to remain silent, and there are insufficient recommendations in the literature on how to enhance employee voice. The purpose of this thesis is to fill a research gap concerning how certain organizational conditions, namely psychological safety, humble leadership and person-organization fit, influence employee voice. In order to answer the research question, a qualitative single-case study was conducted at a social enterprise. The findings suggest that psychological safety positively influences employee voice. Similarly, humble leadership influences employee voice positively. A strong person-organization fit in terms of value congruence was found to help stir employee behavior in a streamlined direction, through the mechanism of serving as a compass for employees, consequently influencing employee voice in a positive direction. However, the existence of a high degree of person-organization fit beginning at recruitment was also found to inherently exclude certain types of employee voice, i.e. influencing specific types of employee voice negatively. Additionally, the concepts were found to reinforce each other, either leading to virtuous or vicious cycles in terms of influencing employee voice.