Research Excellence Award: Missing and marginalised voices: Exploring LGBT+ Networks as a Catalyst for Employee Voice and Intersectional Representation in the Workplace £101,388

Employee voice has long been recognised as a central dimension of fairer workplaces and good jobs (Dundon et al. 2004; Wilkinson and Fay, 2011). However, scholars of employee voice overlooked workforce diversity, assuming employees are homogeneous and express themselves generically (Syed, 2021). An exception to the above is the emergence of research on ‘employee networks’ (Álvarez-Figueroa, 2023; Beaver, 2023), and their potential to offer a distinct ‘form’ of voice for the representation of marginalised organisational communities, and those who remain ‘invisible’ and/or silent. Yet while calls have been made for research which address the potential ‘missing voices’ of diverse workforce identities (Kouggianou, 2019), such studies remain limited. For example, the literature predominantly – and erroneously – makes heteronormative generalisations, perpetuating a heterosexist approach and neglecting the voice of diverse sexual identities (Corlett et al., 2022; Dahanayake et al., 2023). Few studies have explicitly examined the voice opportunities and experiences of sexual minority employees in mainstream employee voice debates; indeed LGBT+ employees remain missing in most theoretical and empirical conceptualisations of voice in the HRM and management literature (Bell et.al, 2011; Syed, 2021; McFadden and Crowley-Henry, 2018; McNulty et al., 2018). This PhD project is therefore an opportunity to ‘give voice’ to LGBT+ employees, including transgender and non-binary workers, currently underrepresented in the extant literature. It will also contribute to the modest literature concerning the potential of employee networks to amplify the voice of minority groups, as well as the theoretical and empirical laguna of LGBT+ voice and intersectionality in HRM more generally.