Communicating more or less? Employees’ playful work design and their voice and feedback-seeking behaviors

Does making work more playful encourage employees to speak up or to seek feedback instead? We argue that playful work design (PWD) can lead to both outcomes, depending on how it shapes employees’ sense of ownership over their work. Drawing on extended self-theory and goal orientation theory, we propose that PWD enhances employees’ job-based psychological ownership. This heightened sense of ownership, in turn, discourages voice behavior while encouraging feedback seeking. We further show that these effects are contingent on employees’ goal orientations: performance-prove and performance-avoid orientations shape when and for whom these dynamics emerge. Using one experiment and two multi-wave survey studies, we find consistent support for our model. By uncovering the divergent interpersonal consequences of PWD, our study suggests that making work more playful is not uniformly beneficial and highlights the importance of understanding how employees interpret and enact play at work.