Despite efforts to foster inclusivity and diversity, identity-based harassment remains a pervasive issue in the workplace. Initially, we expected that employee voice – when individuals perceive their work environment as conducive to freely expressing ideas and opinions (Morrison, 2011) – to be an organizational characteristic that mitigates the detrimental effects of identity-based harassment. Counterintuitively, we discovered in three large datasets (total n = 2,286,047) that both a high voice climates and high levels of voice expression amplified the negative impacts of harassment experiences on employees’ job attitudes (engagement, morale, and satisfaction). We abductively identify, and then deductively test, that diminished sense of belonging is a social mechanism that explains why high voice exacerbates, rather than mitigates, the negative effects of harassment on job attitudes. We conclude by suggesting that identity-conscious voice mechanisms may be more effective at mitigating the negative effects of identity-based harassment on employees’ job attitudes and propose the next steps for examining this direction for the work using an experimental design.
