Someone’s Going to Hear about This

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine how the nature of dissenttriggering events influenced to whom employees chose to express dissent. This was accomplished by asking respondents to report the frequency with which they expressed upward dissent to managers and supervisors, lateral dissent to coworkers, and displaced dissent to people external to their organizations (i.e., family and nonwork friends) in response to different dissent-triggering events. Structural equation models were employed. Results revealed that employeeswere more likely to express dissent to supervisors and coworkers about issues related to their coworkers and about organizational functions such as decision making and organizational change than they were to express dissent about ethical practices and preventing harm to employees. Employees did not appear to differentiate the amount of dissent they expressed to people outside of their organizations as a function of dissent-triggering events.