Recent advancements in the study of employee voice have underscored the importance of voice quality and shed light on its three dimensions—desirability, feasibility, and degree of change. This emerging line of research has also highlighted the inherent tradeoff among these dimensions, in that individual initiatives and organizational factors that promote the desirability and feasibility of employees’ voice can inadvertently constrain the scope of the changes proposed by employees. To tackle this challenge in promoting employee voice quality, we investigate how employees’ external advice-seeking ties outside of their organization can simultaneously enhance all dimensions of voice quality, as these ties provide not only perspectives and information to help employees develop ideas to be more useful and actionable but also out-of-the-“box” thinking that can help overcome the cognitive fixations imposed by their organizational context. Further, we examine how the ties towards competing vs. noncompeting organizations affect the dimensions differentially. In a multi-wave study with 398 employees and their supervisors across 121 stores in three shopping malls, we found that external advice-seeking not only enhances the desirability and feasibility of employee voice but also increases the degree of change proposed, whereas internal advice-seeking within one’s organization decreases the degree of change. We further find that ties to non-competing organizations are more effective in fostering a greater degree of change in voice compared to ties to competing organizations. These findings provide important theoretical and practical insights into promoting employee voice quality while addressing its complex, multidimensional nature.
