As research on employee voice proliferates, there is an emerging interest in understanding the kinds of voice that have greater potential to enhance performance – i.e., the productivity and quality of unit and organizational outputs. Yet existing work in this area has focused primarily on characteristics of voice that appear valued by recipients, falling short in specifying the dimensions that contribute to voice’s performance-enhancing potential or the conditions that facilitate its development in organizations. Envisioning “voice quality” as a cross-level and context-specific phenomenon, we advance a contextualized theory that first draws on an organizational ambidexterity perspective to detail how voice quality is multiplicatively composed of three dimensions – desirability, feasibility, and, in exploration-focused contexts, degree of change. Further recognizing that the development of voice quality depends on context-specific knowledge, experiences, and cognitions, we accentuate how time – in conjunction with other individual and contextual factors – produces ebbs and flows in voice quality in the specific case of newcomer socialization. Altogether, our framework aims to build consensus around a contextualized understanding of the dimensions of voice quality, highlight its dynamic nature, and advance a temporally precise theory around its unique nomological network in organizations.

This study takes a dynamic multilevel approach to examine how the relationship between an employee's job satisfaction trajectory and subsequent turnover may change depending on the employee's unit's job satisfaction trajectory and its dispersion. Analyses of longitudinal multilevel data collected from 5,270 employees in 175 business units of a hospitality company demonstrate a significant three-way interactive effect of unit-level job satisfaction trajectory and its dispersion and individual job satisfaction trajectory on individual job exit. In particular, in the presence of a negative unit-level job satisfaction trajectory and low dispersion, a positive change in individual-level job satisfaction does not affect the odds of a person leaving an organization. Put differently, an employee's being out of step with prevailing unit-level attitudes appears to alter the relationship between his or her job satisfaction trajectory and turnover propensity. Further, unit-level job-satisfaction change and its dispersion jointly influence the overall turnover rate in a unit. The results indicate unit-level and individual-level job satisfaction trajectories have unique multilevel influences on turnover above and beyond static levels of job satisfaction. Accounting for these dynamics substantially increases the explained variance in turnover behavior. The findings increase understanding of the job satisfaction–turnover link over time and across levels.

This research developed and tested a model of turnover contagion in which the job embeddedness and job search behaviors of coworkers influence employees' decisions to quit. In a sample of 45 branches of a regional bank and 1,038 departments of a national hospitality firm, multilevel analysis revealed that coworkers' job embedded-ness and job search behaviors explain variance in individual “voluntary turnover” over and above that explained by other individual and group-level predictors. Broadly speaking, these results suggest that coworkers' job embeddedness and job search behaviors play critical roles in explaining why people quit their jobs. Implications are discussed.