Upward Mobility, the Cleft Habitus, and Speaking Up: How Class Transitions Relate to Individual and Organizational Antecedents of Voice

This research explores the relationship between upward mobility and voice. We build hypotheses and find evidence that rather than being imprinted with a lower sense of efficacy, the upwardly mobile possess a high internal sense of efficacy and are likely to speak up. However, this positive pathway to voice for the upwardly mobile is offset by managers being more inclined to solicit voice from those who come from, and have remained in, higher social class positions. We test our hypotheses in three studies: a field survey, a preregistered analysis of an archival dataset, and a preregistered experiment. This work provides evidence that the internal self-views long associated with those from lower social class backgrounds may not adequately describe the upwardly mobile. Contrary to having a persistent low sense of their abilities, we find that the upwardly mobile espouse high efficacy and do speak up but that managers appear less likely to provide them with equal opportunities for voice, instead seeking it from employees from more elite backgrounds. This work also extends theories of employee voice by showing how managers’ decisions about whose input to solicit are influenced by employees’ socially significant characteristics in ways that could lead to systematic disadvantages.