Many factors influence workers' decision to voice, including psychological safety and perceived impact. When conditions favor voice, such as when workers feel it is safe to speak up and that their input will have an impact, they are generally more likely to do so. However, workers sometimes voice even when conditions are unfavorable, or they refrain from voice even when conditions are favorable. The literature has yet to fully address these 'exceptions to the rule'—instances of voice or lack thereof that defy what is currently understood about the conditions under which workers speak up. To explain why workers sometimes speak up even when it’s risky or refrain from speaking up even when it’s safe, this study introduces and establishes the concept of a duty to voice (DTV), defined as an inner sense of duty to speak up at work with ideas, suggestions, or concerns, irrespective of contextual or external factors such as psychological safety and perceived impact. Specifically, we develop and validate a six-item DTV scale (total N=503 participants) across three studies. We find that DTV is a theoretically distinct construct from a willingness to voice and that DTV uniquely and strongly predicts both prohibitive and promotive voice, even when controlling for psychological safety and perceived impact. Our results provide compelling support for the DTV construct and measure, demonstrating that the scale effectively captures the construct it is intended to measure (convergent validity), is distinct from established, separate-but-related constructs (discriminant validity), and offers explanatory power beyond known predictors of voice (incremental validity).
