While more organisations are finding employee voice as critical for developing business intelligence, they continue to grapple with employee reticence and bringing solutions, ideas, and concerns to managers’ attention. Drawing on emerging voice literature and integrated findings from two independent studies we carried out, we propose a) an empirical examination of how social and relational factors shape ‘employee upward voice’; b) to present a cross-level framework of employee upward voice delineating how voice directed to potential diverse targets, contingent on interpersonal exchanges, can serve as key underlying process for employee upward initiation.

As leaders and organizations can no longer assume that people who speak up are not withholding other ideas/issues, we believe this inquiry would help extend management perspectives on employee voice behaviour and contribute to voice scholarship. We anticipate that our framework can inform empirical research, by clarifying the social relationships that can be expected in individual discretion to voice and open up paths for future research.