Predicting Employee Dissent Expression in Organizations: A Cost and Benefit Approach

Employee dissent is understood as resulting from unsatisfying organizational states. Dissatisfaction can be felt but not expressed; dissent is the actual performance of disagreement with immediate circumstances. Constructive expression of dissent can have positive consequences, and therefore, much scholarly attention has been drawn to the phenomenon. In this article, we theorize that argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness influence employee dissent behavior. Our particular contribution is that we hypothesize that these effects are mediated by assessments of the costs and benefits of dissent. We test whether the previously reported direct effects of argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness are mediated by this cost–benefit analysis. A survey was conducted with undergraduate students and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk participants (N = 817). Structural equation modeling showed that the apparent direct effects of verbal aggressiveness and argumentativeness became insignificant after the mediators were included in the model. We conclude that cost and benefit analysis mediates the main effects.