‘Supportive voices’ get picked for teams at work

Communicating in “supportive voice” at work may make your colleagues want you on their team, research finds.

“What we say within a group, the ideas we suggest, and the way we support others, signals something about who we are to our coworkers. It can attract people to us or repel them,” says Melissa Chamberlin, assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at Iowa State University, and coauthor of a paper on the topic in the Journal of Management.

In the paper, Chamberlin and her research team demonstrate how two different ways of communicating work-related issues shape reputations and affect the formation of teams to complete short-term projects. They found people who use “supportive voice,” which fuels trust and cooperation, have a higher chance of being recruited to a team compared to those who use a more task-oriented “challenging voice.”

Challenging voice pushes back against the status quo and offers ideas for improvement. While it has some downsides, such as perceived criticism or conflict, challenging voice tends to signal an employee’s competence or expertise. Chamberlin says managers, especially in dynamic and fast-paced industries, often value this communication behavior as something that can help teams complete tasks efficiently and effectively.

“Supportive voice is still about speaking up in the workplace, but it’s looking at what’s going well in the group or team. It might defend the status quo by saying there’s value in what the team is already doing,” says Chamberlin.

Supportive voice signals someone’s approachability and trustworthiness. It fosters strong interpersonal relationships, which Chamberlin says affects a team’s ability to communicate and coordinate efforts in order to reach goals.

To understand the effects of the two communication behaviors on team formation, the researchers collected data from a cohort of full-time, first-year Master of Business Administration students over a four-month period. The students were periodically assigned to different teams to complete projects and then asked to rate fellow team members’ use of challenging and supportive voice, quality of work, reputation, and trust. Near the end of the study, students could assemble into teams without any direction from the MBA office.

The study results revealed students who ranked high on challenging voice built a reputation for conducting high-quality work, but students preferred to work in teams with those who frequently used supportive voice. Chamberlin says the results were surprising.

“Because challenging voice is the predominant form of speaking up we encourage in classrooms and as managers, we thought it was going to be a strong driver of people selecting team members later. But as it turns out, this more supportive voice that helps establish relationships and a sense of trust amongst individuals in the group was more important,” Chamberlin says.

The researchers point out that having both types of voice would be ideal, but between the two, supportive voice was a stronger driver of team formation.

Chamberlin says the paper’s findings could help employees realize the way they speak up can have a strong effect on informal teaming up at a later point and help them move into leadership roles. As for managers, Chamberlin says the results could encourage them to foster and provide space for more supportive voice by coaching this type of behavior and rewarding employees who speak up supportively.

“There might be times that challenging voice reigns supreme but other situations where supportive voice becomes more critical for a team,” says Chamberlin. “Supportive voicers can keep teams together to make sure the work gets done.”

Researchers from the University of Iowa, Binghamton University, and University of Georgia contributed to the paper.

Source: Iowa State University

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