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.

中文翻译：

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扑灭燃烧的火焰：调查令人望而却步的声音引发的紧迫性


组织依靠员工报告阻碍组织效率的问题，并依靠主管来解决这些问题。尽管通常认为禁止性声音可以帮助组织避免代价高昂的悲剧性后果，但声音文献也表明，主管对禁止性声音的反应比对促进性声音的反应更消极。这种紧张关系促使我们探究一个基本但被忽视的原因，即为什么主管可能会实施禁止性的声音。借鉴语音文献和监管焦点理论中阐明的禁止性语音和促进性语音之间的理论区别，我们提出监督者倾向于实施禁止性语音发作，因为它们引起了响应的紧迫性。我们在对高速交通系统中四年内交付的 555 个离散语音剧集的实地研究中发现了对我们的理论模型的支持（研究 1）。我们在一项回忆实验中复制并扩展了这些发现——主管实施禁止性声音，因为它触发了回应的紧迫性——在一项回忆实验中，我们发现预防重点增强了监督者对禁止性声音的反应紧迫性（研究 2）。综上所述，我们的研究结果表明，尽管发声者可能会因用令人望而却步的声音说话而产生潜在的负面后果，但令人望而却步的声音的主要功能是引发反应的紧迫性，最终产生真正的变化。