Putting Out Burning Fires: Investigating the Urgency Triggered By Prohibitive Voice

Organizations rely on employees to report problems that hinder organizational effectiveness and on supervisors to resolve those problems. Although prohibitive voice is generally thought to help organizations avoid costly and tragic outcomes, the voice literature has also demonstrated that supervisors respond more negatively to prohibitive voice than promotive voice. This tension motivates our inquiry into a fundamental but overlooked reason as to why supervisors might implement prohibitive voice. Drawing upon theoretical distinctions between prohibitive and promotive voice articulated in the voice literature and regulatory focus theory, we propose that supervisors tend to implement prohibitive voice episodes because they elicit an urgency to respond. We find support for our theoretical model in a field study of 555 discrete voice episodes delivered over the course of four years in a high-speed transit system (Study 1). We reproduce and extend these findings—that supervisors implement prohibitive voice because it triggers an urgency to respond—in a recall experiment in which we find that prevention focus enhances supervisors’ response urgency toward prohibitive voice (Study 2). Taken together, our findings demonstrate that despite the potential negative consequences voicers may incur for speaking up with prohibitive voice, a primary function of prohibitive voice is to elicit response urgency that ultimately generates real change.