How Anonymity and Visibility Affordances Influence Employees’ Decisions About Voicing Workplace Concerns

Employees can provide invaluable input to organizations when they can freely express their opinions at work. Employees, however, may not believe that it is safe or efficacious to voice their concerns. How features of communication channels affect employees’ safety and efficacy perceptions is largely ignored in existing voice models. Therefore, this study seeks to understand how the anonymity and visibility affordances of a communication channel influence employees’ safety and efficacy perceptions, and, thus, their intention to engage in prohibitive voice at work. Two between-subjects experiments were conducted to test how these channel affordances affect voicing behavior in organizations. The results indicate that the more anonymous and less visible participants perceive a voicing channel to be, the safer and the more efficacious they evaluate the channel. Theoretical and practical implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.