Title: Employee voice and silence: a bibliometric analysis of the literature

Authors: Debra L. Casey; G. Steven McMillan

Addresses: Temple University, Fox School of Business and Management, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA ' Penn State Abington, 1600 Woodland Road, Abington, PA 19001, USA

Abstract: Employee voice and silence as constructs have received substantial research efforts for over four decades primarily in the work-focused academic literatures. However, we are concerned that these terms are being used across many disciplines with little cohesion as to meaning. By examining the extant literature using bibliometric techniques, we hope to make a contribution in better defining their usages and describing the underlying structure of the employee voice and silence literature. We examine 376 articles, notes and book chapters derived from the Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science. Using advanced bibliometric mapping tools, we plot the intellectual base and research front of the voice and silence literature. Our findings indicate that employee silence and employee voice are terms that are largely claimed by the organisational behaviour (OB) and human resource management (HRM) literatures. Further, these terms are defined much more narrowly than in the literature from the industrial relations or employment relations (ER) disciplines.

Keywords: employee voice; silence; bibliometrics; visuals.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBBM.2019.097729

International Journal of Bibliometrics in Business and Management, 2019 Vol.1 No.3, pp.251 - 266

Received: 26 Feb 2018
Accepted: 13 Aug 2018
Published online: 06 Feb 2019 *

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