Keep Quiet: Unheard Voices of Domestic Workers in Nigeria

This chapter explores the phenomenon of silence and unheard employee voice among domestic workers in Nigeria. While voice involves the presence and processes that facilitate two-way communication between management and employees (Marginson et al., 2010), unheard voice is a situation in which employees express their voice, and it is ignored. Silence is where employees fail to express their voice, either because of the risks involved in doing so or because of the perceived futility in doing so (Detert & Trevino, 2010; Grant, 2013). When the perceived risks of voicing outweigh the perceived benefits, silence is likely to ensue: the withholding of any form of genuine expression about a perceived or experienced injustice from persons capable of effecting change or redress (Pinder & Harlos, 2001). Conceptually, silence is the failure to voice (Morrison, 2011, 2014), and there is research interest in how employers perpetuate a climate of silence concerning a range of issues (Donaghey et al., 2011). The term ‘Employee voice’ refers to the ways in which employees attempt to have a say—formally and/or informally, collectively and/or individually—potentially to influence organisational affairs relating to issues that affect their work, interests, and the interests of managers and owners (Wilkinson et al., 2020a, p. 5). In the extant literature on industrial relations, voice is concerned with workers’ issues while in organisational behaviour and human resource management literature, the focus is more on organisational improvement (see Oyetunde et al., 2022; Wilkinson et al., 2021). While voice is considered critical to both employees and employers, notions of voice are very much rooted in western scholarship, and research on voice remains concentrated in traditional organisations in formal economies within Anglo-American countries (Pyman et al., 2016; Wilkinson et al., 2020b). The few studies conducted on employee voice in regions of the global south suggest that voice may have limited applicability to contexts in which cultural values and working conditions differ considerably to those in western nations (Mellahi et al., 2010; Soltani et al., 2018).