Article Abstract
Scholars increasingly recognize the existence of voice habit, wherein employees speak up automatically without considering relevant situational factors, being able to control their impulse to voice, and exerting effort in deciding whether to voice. However, a lack of theory testing and an absence of a psychometrically valid measure have called into question its theoretical usefulness as well as its construct validity. Moreover, contrary to Lam et al.’s (2018) theorizing on the interpersonal costs and intrapersonal benefits of voice habit, research on the reticence bias suggests the opposite: Habitual voicers may gain interpersonal benefits by experiencing higher supervisor liking, but they may also suffer intrapersonal costs by experiencing voice regret. Integrating these divergent insights with theorizing on voice habit, we predict that voice habit may elicit supervisor liking when supervisors perceive habitual voicers as having higher prosocial motives or behavioral integrity, even though habitual voicers may experience regret in work units with a weaker voice climate. Results from a multiwave, multisource field study with 435 employees and 135 supervisors using a 12-item validated scale of voice habit support our hypotheses. Our work provides a direct test and extension of the recently proposed theorizing on voice habit and introduces a psychometrically valid measure for future research use. Our findings also empirically support the dual nature of voice habit, highlighting both its potential functional interpersonal outcomes in relation to supervisors and its potential dysfunctional intrapersonal outcomes for habitual voicers.
Journal of Applied Psychology, December 2025
About the researcher
Andrew Yu (PhD) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Management & Marketing at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He received his doctorate in Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management (OB/HR) from the Eli Broad Graduate School of Management at Michigan State University, United States.
Professor Yu studies how people work together (and most of the time ... why they don’t do it that well) with a focus on how leadership, team dynamics, and organizational systems shape behaviors, decision-making, performance, and well-being. His research questions explores the real-world tensions leaders and team members navigate everyday: How do you drive high performance without burning people out? What helps diverse teams collaborate more effectively? How do our implicit biases shape everyday interactions? What encourages (and prevents) people from speaking up and what happens when they do? He has experience using various research methodologies, including quantitative (experiments, field surveys, secondary data, wearable sensor data) and qualitative (live observations, focus groups) methods.