A bibliometric analysis of the intellectual structure of employee voice research

The contribution individuals can give to decision-making processes is increasingly relevant to any organization. In particular, allowing workers to speak out to the organization can bring relevant issues to light, which otherwise would be left unknown. Based on this, scholars have increasingly devoted attention to the study of employee voice. Despite the plethora of existing works on this topic, there has recently been a proliferation of contributions that emerged from a variety of management fields, which yielded highly fragmented literature. The lack of a comprehensive understanding of employee voice as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon has led to the emergence of a partial perspective of it. Grounding on this, we acknowledge that bibliometric methods represent adequate techniques for summarizing, integrating, and connecting extant literature to provide an inclusive view of a research area, topic, or literature. Consistently, this study bibliometrically analyses more than 450 articles published between 1985 and 2019 to map current research on employee voice. Based on a comprehensive set of measurements that allow to identify most prolific, productive, and cited authors, journals and documents, we applied co-citation analysis to appropriately organize existing research on employee voice as well as to identify the relationships between the main strands of literature so far proposed by scholars. Further, through the keywords co-occurrence, we were able to obtain an overview of the main topics investigated by existing employee voice research, thus providing interesting suggestions for further investigations. In so doing, our study attempts to offer an integrative roadmap for future analysis on employee voice and a rigorous starting point to stimulate research in different fields of study.