Employee voice, psychologisation and human resource management (HRM)

The ‘psychologisation’ of the human resource management (HRM) and industrial relations (IR) has been a major topic of conversation in management journals, not least in HRMJ (Farndale et al., 2020). We contribute to this debate by focussing on employee voice as an important topic of scholarship, and by explaining how this topic has been psychologised over time. First, we review organisational behaviour (OB) voice literature from the 1980s onwards to show how OB voice has itself shifted, and narrowed, over time, making OB voice a more static phenomenon, and one that marginalises other perspectives and stakeholders. In our review, we distinguish between what we call the ‘old’ and ‘new’ OB voice scholarship, the latter occurring from the mid-1990s onwards. We then review all voice publications across four major HR journals from 2000 onwards, to show how OB's psychologised conception of voice has influenced HR voice, and the implications of this for HRM.