Proactive Voice Behavior and Working Memory Capacity: Quality versus Quantity

19th of July 2013
Supervisor:
UvA Course 2012-2013
BScThesis - Business Studies

Proactive Voice Behavior and Working Memory Capacity: Quality versus Quantity

Wordcount:
6536
Tim Molenaars
10003008

Abstract
“Find the time to listen to the Voice of your frontline employees. If you don 't, you 'll know less about your customers than you should.”, that is Anthony Tjan 's (CEO of Cue Ball) advice to all other executives. But how to encourage your employees to show Proactive Voice Behavior (PVB)? Recent research found a construct that may directly affect ones PVB: Working Memory Capacity (WMC). WMC is the mental system responsible for complex tasks such as planning and anticipating future events and it is hypothesized to have a positive effect on both Voice and its Quality, while negatively effecting PVB Quantity. The hypotheses are tested with 39 dyads (manager & employee) through questionnaires and a WMC-test. The results do indicate effects of in the predicted directions, but unfortunately did not reach significance. Future research may fruitfully explore these effects and the newly developed PVB Quality and Quantity scales with larger sample size.

Introduction
Many (top-)managers don’t know exactly what is happening on their work floor and what the overall opinion of their customers is. In contrast, employees, who are at the forefront of communication with the customer, often have ideas, opinions or customer information on how to improve the company 's performance: “Most executives don 't take advantage of the best anthropological consultants already employed: their frontline employees.”, by Anthony K. Tjan - CEO of Cue Ball (HBR, 2012). If this is the case, employees have two options: suppress these ideas and continue as before or speak up and suggest improvements. The latter is referred to by scholars as Proactive Voice Behavior. If employees choose for this option they enable themself to ban the

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