Stand out, speak out: Change-related reciprocal relations between self-perceived status and voice in leaderless teams

In this longitudinal field study, we build on social information processing theory and idiosyncrasy credits theory to examine the change-related reciprocal relations between self-perceived status and voice. Three-wave panel data of 585 employees in a large financial organization and latent change score modelling were used to analyse the theorized intra-individual process, whereby self-perceived status and voice reinforce each other across the first 6 months of working in leaderless teams. The results indicate that higher status related to intra-individual increases in promotive voice, especially in the early months of the teams. Reversely, promotive voice fuelled intra-individual increases in status during the first 3 months but not after. Further, we found that self-perceived status increased concurrently with increases of promotive but not prohibitive voice throughout the 6-month study period. The results indicate that promotive voice functions to gain and maintain higher status beliefs in leaderless teams. Our study extends theory on voice by uncovering how different types of voice and status emerge and co-evolve during the first months of natural teams. Our findings provide important insights on who speaks out in leaderless teams and in what way.