The Missing Worker Voice in Job Quality:  Developing a Conceptual Framework & Survey Instrument for Worker Voice

While there is growing recognition by both researchers and policy makers that worker voice is an important dimension of job quality, to date there is no accepted or validated measure of worker voice suitable for assessing the quality of workers’ jobs. Existing measures of voice fall short by not including both individual and collective voice efforts or by differentiating between voice efforts that address worker or employer interests. Nor do they capture whether actions to exert voice are effective in achieving their intended results. As a dimension of job quality, a worker’s experience of voice must be linked with one’s perception of having a quality job and one’s well-being. To overcome these problems, we developed a measure of “voice efficacy,” which is a worker’s perception that exercising voice at work is instrumental in getting their desired result. We test voice efficacy as a potential dimension of job quality through a nationally representative sample of participants in the United States. We propose that this new measure serves as the voice component in future studies that assess or track job quality.  The student will review the literature and write short memos on job quality and worker voice. The student may also do data cleaning and analysis on the survey using Stata software.  With Duanyi Yang