Voiceless at Work: Decision-Making Participation, Subjective Power, and Mental Health in a Pandemic

Voice--the opportunity to express one's views in the decision-making process--is a central feature of organizational procedures. This study investigates the mental health consequences of the lack of voice at work, or voicelessness , during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a period marked by heightened organizational change and uncertainty. Prior research on procedural justice and mental health has paid limited attention to the specific effect of voice, and few studies have used longitudinal designs that control for unobserved time-stable confounders. Moreover, the mechanisms that link procedural justice to mental health remain underexplored. We address these gaps by assessing the effect of voicelessness on psychological distress and anger using five waves of national longitudinal data of Canadian workers (March 2020 to April 2021) and fixed effects models. We further test whether the sense of mastery and subjective social status (SSS) mediate these relationships. Results show that voicelessness is associated with greater psychological distress and anger, net of time-stable confounders. Mastery functions as a mediator for both outcomes, whereas SSS does not. These findings underscore the importance of organizational efforts to enhance employee voice and identify perceived control as a key mechanism linking voicelessness to mental health.