Exploring organizational dissent in a global setting

Abstract

The current research project focuses on a distinctive form of employee voice: organizational dissent. Dissent is the key to correcting organizational misconduct, facilitating group innovation and enhancing both employee satisfaction and organizational performance. Although organizational dissent has garnered substantial scholarly attention over the last two decades, most of these studies were developed in and for the domestic US environment; little is known about how dissent is conceptualized, expressed and received in a different cultural setting. This dissertation aims to complement previous research by investigating the relationship between organizational dissent and workplace freedom of speech in non-US settings: five European countries, Singapore, and China. This research project consists of one literature review and three empirical studies that make use of both qualitative and quantitative methods. This study showed that employees conceptualize dissent differently across cultures. Latent dissent, for example, has previously been conceptualized as the product of the suppression of upward dissent. However, in collectivistic cultures latent dissent could be perceived as a crucial way of building and maintaining co-worker relationships. In addition, this project suggests that dissent strategy is shaped by economic factors such as the stability of the national economy, the unemployment rate, people’s perception of job security and individual socioeconomic status. This study proposes, further, that dissent is essentially linked with organizational power. Migrant groups in this project tend to express less dissent and perceive a more constrained workplace than the dominant group. Ultimately, this project asserts that generalizing results obtained from the US to other settings warrants caution. Developing cultural-specific theories and measurements is urgently needed in today’s globalized economy.