Jeffrey W. Kassing

Articulating, antagonizing, and displacing: A model of employee dissent

In this paper, I reconceptualize organizational dissent as the expression of disagreements and contradictory opinions that result from the experience of feeling apart from ones organization. Employees experience dissent when they recognize incongruence between actual and desired states of affairs. The theory of unobtrusive control (Tompkins & Cheney, 1985), the theory of independent‐mindedness (Garden & Infante, 1987; Infante & Gorden, 1987), and the Exit‐Voice‐Loyalty model of employee responses to dissatisfaction (Hirschman, 1970) provide the framework for a model of employee dissent. The proposed model incorporates four elements: (a) triggering agent; (b) strategy selection influences; (c) strategy selection; and (d) expressed dissent. Examining variations in employees’ expressions of dissent may contribute to our understanding of employee involvement practices, democratic organizational structures, and employee empowerment efforts.

Development and Validation of the Organizational Dissent Scale

The general trend toward more democratic forms of organizing highlights the necessity to consider how employees engage their organizations in participative environments. Assessing employee dissent represents one means of understanding the dialogue between employee and employer. The purpose of this study was to develop a measure for operationalizing how employees verbally express their contradictory opinions and disagreements about organizational phenomena. The Organizational Dissent Scale (ODS) was developed and tested in a series of studies designed to generate evidence of validity and reliability for the measure. Results indicate that the scale measures how employees express dissent along three dimensions: articulated, antagonistic (latent), and displaced. Results also indicate that initial evidence of validity and reliability exists for the scale.

Speaking up: Identifying Employees’ Upward Dissent Strategies

Previous researchers have considered the nature of dissent as well as the audiences to whom employees express dissent. Absent in these treatments is a specific focus on the actual dissent strategies that employees use. The purpose of this study was to assess strategies employees use to express upward dissent within contemporary organizations. Employees completed a survey instrument that asked them to provide a dissent account. Five distinct strategies emerged from an interpretive thematic analysis of the accounts. Results indicated that employees used direct-factual appeal, repetition, solution presentation, circumvention, and threatening-resignation strategies for expressing upward dissent.

Investigating the relationship between superior‐subordinate relationship quality and employee dissent

The purpose of this study was to examine how subordinates’ perceptions of superior‐subordinate relationship quality (LMX) related to their strategies for expressing dissent. Employees from various organizations completed self‐report survey instruments. Results indicated that subordinates who perceived having high‐quality relationships with their supervisors reported using significantly more articulated dissent than subordinates who perceived having low‐quality relationships with their supervisors. Conversely, subordinates who perceived having low‐quality relationships with their supervisors reported using significantly more latent dissent than subordinates who perceived having high‐quality relationships with their supervisors.

Examining the Relationship between Organizational Dissent and Aggressive Communication

The purpose of this study was to explore the degree to which individual differences, in general, and aggressive communication traits, in particular, influenced employees’dissent strategy selections. Employees completed self-report instruments describing their levels of verbal aggressiveness, argumentativeness, and how they chose to express dissent concerning organizational practices and policies. Results indicated that argumentativeness, verbal aggressiveness, and organizational position predicted articulated and latent dissent use. Results also indicated that individual differences did not predict the use of displaced dissent.

Someone’s Going to Hear about This Examining the Association between Dissent-Triggering Events and Employees’ Dissent Expression

The purpose of this study was to examine how the nature of dissenttriggering events influenced to whom employees chose to express dissent. This was accomplished by asking respondents to report the frequency with which they expressed upward dissent to managers and supervisors, lateral dissent to coworkers, and displaced dissent to people external to their organizations (i.e., family and nonwork friends) in response to different dissent-triggering events. Structural equation models were employed. Results revealed that employeeswere more likely to express dissent to supervisors and coworkers about issues related to their coworkers and about organizational functions such as decision making and organizational change than they were to express dissent about ethical practices and preventing harm to employees. Employees did not appear to differentiate the amount of dissent they expressed to people outside of their organizations as a function of dissent-triggering events.

Communication in the Community of Sport: The Process of Enacting, (Re)Producing, Consuming, and Organizing Sport

The community of sport is a pervasive, influential, complex, and restricted community comprised not only of participants such as coaches, athletes, and referees, but also of spectators at both live and mediated sporting events. Additionally, sports media, amateur and professional sports organizations, sport governing bodies, and fan clubs occupy terrain in the community of sport. We maintain that membership and participation in the community of sport are communicatively accomplished and maintained and that communication functions to constitute and give meaning to the experience of sport. For this reason we assert that the community of sport represents a communicatively rich locale that warrants the attention of communication scholars. Accordingly, we set out to explore the intersection of communication and sport within this chapter. Drawing on literature from the field of communication studies as well as from associated fields we discuss how members in the community of sport communicatively enact, (re)produce, consume, and organize sport. In each of these respective areas we discuss and

“I Would Just Like to be Known as an Athlete”: Managing Hegemony, Femininity, and Heterosexuality in Female Sport

The community of sport is a powerful site for the construction of masculinity, male identities, and heterosexuality. Consequently, the increased entry of women into the sporting arena has been actively resisted, with women athletes either excluded or framed within traditional, sexualized discourses of femininity and heterosexuality. Yet Title IX and increased female participation have been used to suggest that women have achieved sporting empowerment. Thus, elite, professional female athletes provide an interesting position from which to explore the discourses available for womens construction of athletic identities. Using critical discourse analysis with an emphasis on rhetorical and discursive analysis (Potter, 1996), we analyzed 20 interviews with professional female athletes with a particular interest in exploring the problematic nature of performing female identities given the limited hegemonic forms and resources offered by a predominant and powerful male discourse. Analysis revealed limited ways to construct female athleticism that involved complex and contradictory gender work, including the problematic construction of female athleticism through the deployment of hegemonic discourses that framed ordinary women as nonsporting. Our findings suggest that women athletes remain at the peripheries of the community of sport.

Dissent Expression as an Indicator of Work Engagement and Intention to Leave

This study examined how dissent expression related to employees’ self reports of work engagement and intention to leave. A sample of full-time employees completed a multi-instrument questionnaire. Findings indicated that dissent expression related to both employees’ work engagement and their intention to leave. In particular, dissent expressed to management and coworkers associated with work engagement, whereas dissent expressed to nonmanagement audiences associated with intention to leave. Additional analysis revealed that for managers, work engagement was primarily a function of refraining from expressing dissent.

Speaking Up Competently: A Comparison of Perceived Competence in Upward Dissent Strategies

Recent dissent research indicates that employees report using several different strategies for expressing their dissent to management and supervisors (i.e., upward dissent). The purpose of this study was to compare previously recognized upward dissent strategies in terms of perceived competence. Employees completed a survey instrument that asked them to assess the competence of different upward dissent strategies. Results indicate that employees perceived solution presentation to be the most competent upward dissent strategy, followed by direct-factual appeal, repetition, and circumvention. Threatening resignation was perceived as the least competent upward dissent strategy.