Factors Contributing to Employee Activism
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Risser, Ashley
- Area of Honors:
- Management
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Forrest Briscoe, Thesis Supervisor
Forrest Briscoe, Thesis Honors Advisor
Linda K Trevino, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- Employee Activism
Employee Voice
Covid-19 Pandemic
Moral Foundations Theory (MFT)
Social Network Analysis
Power Distance
care giving responsibilities
political ideology
promotive voice
prohibitive voice
employee silence
Employee Silence - Abstract:
- Employees are faced with decisions throughout their professional career. These decisions include speaking up about a policy change, actively participating in a social change petition, or engaging more directly with management to provide feedback. Such decisions occurred prominently during the Covid-19 Pandemic, often focusing on health and safety, and within every sector and industry. Through deciding to act, employees were putting themselves at risk of losing their jobs, but at what cost does a job mean more than loved ones or one’s own life. These actions also may have caused social consequences like enabling personal and professional divides within the workplace. There are numerous factors to consider when employees decide if they want to act or not. Specifically in this research, six of those factors are investigated as possible antecedents of an employee becoming an activist. As this research is foundationally built upon the Covid-19 Pandemic, this adds an extra layer of analysis required to understand and contextualize the situation employees were faced with more completely. With this additional complexity, workplace medical policy, health safety and decision-making processes were being put to test. The Covid-19 Pandemic increased the vulnerability of these subjects, the persons involved in the decision making and all those affected by the decision made. This research aims to see if there might be a connection between these factors and someone, when faced with making a difficult decision, is more likely to become an activist. This research involved the design and implementation of an original survey of faculty in one college of a large university. Survey responses were linked to the signatures on an open faculty protest letter. A subsequent statistical analysis revealed a mixture of support for hypothesized relationships, surprising non-hypothesized relationships, and statistical insignificance.