Measuring The Connection Between Worker Voice and Job Quality

Many consider having some form of voice on the job—and through it, some capacity to achieve improvements in the workplace—to be an important aspect of job quality. For example, a working definition of good jobs developed in 2022 as part of an initiative by the Families and Workers Fund and the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program includes voice in the workplace as one component of a good job.

However, until recently, the link between having a say in the workplace and workers’ job satisfaction and well-being had not been empirically demonstrated by researchers. Now, a new paper published online in the British Journal of Industrial Relations addresses that question. The paper, “Does Voice Gap Influence Workers’ Job Attitudes and Well-Being? Measuring Voice as a Dimension of Job Quality,” was coauthored by a team of scholars from the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER) at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and San Francisco State University’s Lam Family College of Business; the coauthors are Yaminette Díaz-Linhart, Thomas Kochan, Arrow Minster, Dongwoo Park, and Duanyi Yang. Díaz-Linhart (shown in the photo above) is a postdoctoral associate at IWER, where Kochan is the George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management Emeritus. Park is a doctoral candidate at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, where Yang is an Assistant Professor of Global Labor and Work. Minster is an Assistant Professor of Management at the Lam Family College of Business at San Francisco State. 

Through survey research involving a nationally representative samples of 1307 U.S. workers, the authors tested the effect of a concept called the "voice gap” on workers’ job attitudes and well-being. The “voice gap” concept, which is drawn from previous research by Thomas Kochan, Duanyi Yang, William Kimball, and MIT Sloan Professor Erin L. Kelly, measures the difference between how much say workers have on a workplace issue and how much they think they ought to have.

In their survey research, Díaz-Linhart, Kochan, Minster, Park, and Yang looked both at voice on issues that benefit workers directly (such as pay and working conditions) and on topics that are more related to the interests of the organization they work for (such as improving the organization’s performance). Even after controlling for other aspects of job quality, having a bigger voice gap on the job was statistically associated with lower job satisfaction and well-being as well as higher levels of burnout and a greater level of interest in looking for a new job. Moreover, a voice gap on issues directly related to workers’ interests had a stronger and more statistically significant effect than a voice gap on organizational issues. The researchers also found that the larger the voice gap on issues directly related to workers’ interests, the more likely nonunionized workers were be interested in joining a union.

“Our findings suggest that the voice gap measure is a valuable tool for survey research exploring job quality,” Díaz-Linhart, Kochan, Minster, Park, and Yang conclude. “It is our hope that this study will inspire further exploration into the various institutional, organizational and interpersonal factors that contribute to quality employment by addressing the gaps in voice faced by workers.”