David Eccles School of Business
1 Employee Voice in Saudi Arabia
Rajeh Albugami; Amelia Stillwell (Management); and Ariel Blair (Management)
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Amelia Stillwell (Management, University of Utah)
Abstract
Within organizations, employees are faced with the decision when they have a new idea or suggestion: either speaking up (i.e. voice; Morrison, 2011), or remaining silent. Employee voice has been shown to increase creativity in organizations. Yet, the research around employee voice has been largely focused on Western workplace contexts. Little research has examined voice in other cultural contexts, even though culture is known to guide norms around discussion and dissent. In this study, we look deeper into how employees voice in the Saudi Arabian work context.
Introduction
Employee voice– the voluntary decision to speak up with suggestions to improve the organization (Morrison, 2011)– has important positive impacts for organizations. As a form of idea sharing, voice also increases creativity (Carnevale, J.B., Huang, L., Crede, M., Harms, P., and Uhl-Bien, M. (2017). Employee Voice also increases organizational performance through the transfer of knowledge (Argote & Ingram, 2000). Therefore understanding and enabling voice is vital for an organization’s success.
Research on employee voice has mainly focused on Western workplaces, implicitly assuming that these findings generalize to other cultural contexts, such as Saudi Arabia. Yet, organizations don’t exist in isolation from their broader cultural context: they are influenced by the national culture in which they are embedded (Kwon, Farndale, 2016). Saudi Arabia is a high power distance culture with tight norms and high context, meaning that in Saudi culture, hierarchy is well-established and socially accepted (i.e. high power distance; Hofstede, 1982), norms are strict, and there is low tolerance for deviance (i.e. tightness; Gelfand et al., 2011), and social context shapes the meaning of interpersonal communication (i.e. high context; Hall, 1959, 1976). The combination of these norms likely creates a different context for voice than that observed in Western cultures, where voice has previously been studied. Thus, existing research on employee voice may not generalize to Saudi Arabia, as culture influences norms for appropriate behavior in a given context (Lapinski & Rimal, 2005; Zhou et al., 2015). Indeed, cultural tightness and hierarchy, in particular, influence tolerance of dissent, a closely related construct to voice (Blair & Bligh, 2018; Harrington & Gelfand, 2014; Morgan & Kelly, 2021). Because research suggests that both power distance and cultural tightness are associated with a lower tolerance for dissent and deviance (Blair & Bligh, 2018; Harrington & Gelfand, 2014), we argue that these differences in Saudi culture shape workplace voice norms in ways not understood by previous research.
To address this missed opportunity, we sought to better understand the strategies