Engaging Dissatisfied Retail Employees to Voice Promotive Ideas: The Role of Continuance Commitment

Retailers rely on employees’ promotive work-related ideas to spur service delivery innovations. Yet a well-established finding in the literature is that employees refrain from sharing such ideas when they are dissatisfied, and a mountain of evidence suggests that job dissatisfaction is an epidemic in the retail industry. The intuitive solution would be for supervisors to support these employees; by willfully listening to employees’ problems and providing help, supervisors could expect employees to voice their ideas. However, our results, from a field study and a controlled experiment, suggest that support should only be provided if a dissatisfied retail employee is also committed to his or her organization out of necessity. Otherwise, support ends up inducing levels of employee voice that are not significantly different than would be the case had the support been withheld, yielding the support a misallocation of effort.

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► Dissatisfied retail employees often voluntarily quit or disengage.
► However, we identify a condition wherein these employees engage in voice behaviors.
► Voice behaviors are communication efforts regarding creative and promotive solutions.
► From two studies, we find that continuance commitment plays a calculative role.
► Supervisor support influenced voice when continuance commitment was high, not low.