Voiceless at Work
Decision-Making Participation, Subjective Power, and Mental Health in a Pandemic
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5352379 |
|---|---|
| Authors | A Narisada (0000-0002-2904-0431, Saint Mary's University), Schieman (0000-0003-2882-0417, University of Toronto) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-10-07 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Work and Occupations (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0730-8884 • E-ISSN: 1552-8464 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/07308884251381781 |
| OpenAlex | W4414909732 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 61 |
Voice--the opportunity to express one's views in the decision-making process--is a central feature of organizational procedures. This study investigates the mental health consequences of the lack of voice at work, or voicelessness , during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a period marked by heightened organizational change and uncertainty. Prior research on procedural justice and mental health has paid limited attention to the specific effect of voice, and few studies have used longitudinal designs that control for unobserved time-stable confounders. Moreover, the mechanisms that link procedural justice to mental health remain underexplored. We address these gaps by assessing the effect of voicelessness on psychological distress and anger using five waves of national longitudinal data of Canadian workers (March 2020 to April 2021) and fixed effects models. We further test whether the sense of mastery and subjective social status (SSS) mediate these relationships. Results show that voicelessness is associated with greater psychological distress and anger, net of time-stable confounders. Mastery functions as a mediator for both outcomes, whereas SSS does not. These findings underscore the importance of organizational efforts to enhance employee voice and identify perceived control as a key mechanism linking voicelessness to mental health
Employment and Welfare Studies · Health, psychology, and well-being · Resilience and Mental Health
Procedural Justice
The Oxford Handbook of Justice in the Workplace
The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice
Fixed Effects Regression Models
Introduction to Statistical Mediation Analysis
Social Stress in the Twenty-First Century
Effects of justice conditions on discrete emotions.
Psychosocial Resources and the Stress Process
Sampling the Stress Universe
Current Issues and Future Directions in Research into the Stress Process
Exploring the Role of Emotions in Injustice Perceptions and Retaliation.
The Sense of Personal Control
Justice at the millennium
Relationship of subjective and objective social status with psychological and physiological functioning
Short screening scales to monitor population prevalences and trends in non-specific psychological distress
Handbook of Organizational Justice
Role Strains and Personal Stress
What Should Be Done with Equity Theory
The Blackwell Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behaviour
In Control or Fatalistically Ruled? The Sense of Mastery among Working Canadians
Procedural Justice, Distributive Justice
Organizational Justice
Procedural justice and status
Voice, control, and procedural justice
Regression with Missing Ys
Do time-invariant confounders explain away the association between job stress and workers' mental health
Social status and health
Effects of "voice" and peer opinions on responses to inequity
Do Workers Speak Up When Feeling Job Insecure? Examining Workers’ Response to Precarity During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Distributive and procedural justice
When do we need procedural fairness? The role of trust in authority
Psychological models of the justice motive
An Interpretation of the Relation Between Objective and Subjective Social Status
Subjective social status
Subjective social status and health
Socioeconomic status and health
Financial circumstances, mastery, and mental health
The Sociological Study of Stress
The Sociogenesis of Psychological Disorder
The Stress Process
The Structure of Coping
An Overview of US Workers' Current Organizing Efforts and Collective Actions
Personal Resources and Depression in the Transition to Adulthood
Clues of subjective social status among young adults
Does Fairness Matter More to Some than to Others? The Moderating Role of Workplace Status on The Relationship Between Procedural Fairness Perceptions and Job Satisfaction
Organizational Justice and Job Satisfaction
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |