Helping and Voice Behaviors scale

1. Abstract

The Helping and Voice Behaviors scale, developed by Linn Van Dyne and Jeffrey A. LePine in 1998, represents a foundational psychometric instrument designed to assess two distinct dimensions of extra-role behavior in the workplace: helping behavior and voice behavior. Rooted in organizational psychology and management science, the instrument differentiates between affiliative, cooperative actions that preserve interpersonal cohesion and challenging, change-oriented actions that question existing organizational practices to drive constructive improvement. Comprising 13 items across two subscales—7 items assessing helping behaviors and 6 items assessing voice behaviors—the measure uses a 7-point Likert-type response scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”).

The scale possesses multi-source flexibility, featuring validated parallel wording for self-report, peer-report, and supervisor-report administrations. Across empirical evaluations, the instrument demonstrates exceptional psychometric properties. Internal consistency reliability estimates (Cronbach’s alpha) consistently range from .85 to .95 for the helping subscale and from .82 to .96 for the voice subscale across self, peer, and supervisory assessment sources. Longitudinal test-retest reliability across a six-month interval yielded coefficients of .81 for helping and .78 for voice. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) establish clear structural distinction between helping, voice, and baseline in-role performance, demonstrating longitudinal and cross-source measurement invariance. This article provides a comprehensive academic analysis of the scale’s construct definition, theoretical lineage, psychometric validation, factor structure, scoring conventions, and research and administrative applications.

2. Keywords

Helping behavior, voice behavior, extra-role behavior, organizational citizenship behavior, Linn Van Dyne, Jeffrey LePine, psychometrics, proactive behavior, employee voice, organizational psychology

3. Authors

The Helping and Voice Behaviors scale was authored and psychometrically validated by:

• Linn Van Dyne, Ph.D.: Professor Emeritus of Management at the Eli Broad College of Business, Michigan State University. Dr. Van Dyne is an internationally recognized authority on proactive employee behaviors, organizational citizenship, cultural intelligence, and voice in organizational systems.
• Jeffrey A. LePine, Ph.D.: PetSmart Chair in Leadership and Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship at the W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. Dr. LePine’s research specializes in team functioning, individual and team adaptation, employee voice, engagement, and organizational behavior.

The original seminal paper introducing the instrument was published in the Academy of Management Journal (1998, Vol. 41, No. 1, pp. 108–119), entitled “Helping and Voice Extra-Role Behaviors: Evidence of Construct and Predictive Validity.”

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Helping and Voice Behaviors scale is to capture and distinguish two fundamentally divergent manifestations of extra-role organizational performance. In workplace scholarship, job performance has historically been conceptualized through the lens of prescribed, formally contracted task proficiencies—often termed in-role behaviors. However, modern organizational paradigms require interpersonal adaptability and voluntary initiatives that transcend narrow job descriptions. Van Dyne and LePine engineered this instrument to resolve conceptual conflations within the broader rubric of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and to provide researchers and practitioners with an empirically rigorous tool capable of measuring discretionary behavior along distinct motivational and functional axes.

Specifically, the instrument addresses the crucial theoretical distinction between promotive/affiliative behavior and promotive/challenging behavior:

• Helping Behavior: Measures cooperative, affiliative actions directed toward assisting colleagues with workload distribution, onboarding new personnel, and facilitating harmonic interpersonal collaboration within the work unit.
• Voice Behavior: Measures proactive, challenging expressions intended to improve organizational functioning by questioning standard operating procedures, presenting innovative solutions, and articulating informed dissent even in the face of interpersonal resistance or disagreement.

In applied organizational development, human resource management, and organizational research, the scale is deployed to evaluate leadership styles, team psychological safety, cross-cultural workplace dynamics, organizational justice perceptions, and performance appraisal systems. By providing parallel linguistic templates for self, peer, and managerial ratings, the instrument enables multi-source (360-degree) assessment, mitigating common method variance and elucidating perceptual discrepancies between employee intentions and supervisory or peer observations.

5. Psychological Construct

The Helping and Voice Behaviors scale is anchored in the broad construct of extra-role behavior (ERB), defined as discretionary employee actions that benefit the organization, are not required as part of formal job duties, and do not lead to formal sanctions if omitted. Van Dyne and LePine operationalized extra-role behavior into two theoretically divergent dimensions that differ across psychological intent, interpersonal friction, and operational outcomes.

Helping Behavior (Promotive-Affiliative)

Helping behavior is an affiliative, interpersonal-oriented construct characterized by cooperative, supportive, and relationship-sustaining initiatives. Grounded in prosocial organizational behavior, helping manifests through small, tangible acts of consideration that maintain systemic equilibrium. It is inherently non-controversial and preserves interpersonal harmony because it does not challenge existing organizational arrangements or administrative authority.

Key facets of the helping construct include:

• Altruistic Work Sharing: Voluntarily stepping in to alleviate a coworker’s excessive workload or assisting with complex operational responsibilities without explicit instruction from supervisors.
• Socialization Facilitation: Taking proactive personal responsibility to orient, guide, and instruct new employees regarding organizational practices and functional workflows.
• Unit-Level Engagement: Attending optional team meetings, volunteering for collective service functions, and demonstrating active investment in the group’s social and operational welfare.

Voice Behavior (Promotive-Challenging)

Voice behavior is a change-oriented, challenging construct defined as proactive verbal communication that challenges the status quo with the explicit intention of improving organizational performance. Unlike passive compliance or complaints, voice involves constructive, forward-looking proposals. Because it highlights operational inefficiencies, identifies systemic weaknesses, or questions established management routines, voice carries inherent interpersonal and political risk.

Key facets of the voice construct include:

• Constructive Challenge to the Status Quo: Verbalizing critiques of existing methodologies and advocating for innovative changes in operational procedures or organizational policies.
• Intellectual Involvement: Keeping rigorously informed on emerging professional, technical, or structural issues in order to offer well-reasoned recommendations to the work unit.
• Principled Dissent: Communicating honest, constructive perspectives regarding work matters even when one’s perspective diverges sharply from that of peers or authority figures.
• Mobilization: Actively encouraging fellow team members to take part in governance, quality-of-life enhancements, and strategic adaptations.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework underlying the Helping and Voice Behaviors scale synthesizes conceptual models from organizational psychology, social exchange theory, and role theory. The foundation rests primarily upon four prominent theoretical frameworks:

1. The Taxonomy of Extra-Role Behaviors (Van Dyne, Cummings, & McLean Parks, 1995)

Van Dyne, Cummings, and McLean Parks established a conceptual typology classifying extra-role behaviors along two orthogonal dimensions: affiliative/promotive versus challenging/promotive. Affiliative-promotive behaviors (helping) reinforce social cohesion, express solidarity, and strengthen established processes. Conversely, challenging-promotive behaviors (voice) seek organizational growth through dynamic disruption, calculated confrontation, and structural change. The scale provides the definitive psychometric operationalization of this conceptual model.

2. Social Exchange Theory (Blau, 1964)

Social exchange theory posits that employment relationships extend beyond transactional economic contracts into socio-emotional exchanges governed by reciprocity norms. When organizations cultivate supportive climates, employees reciprocate by investing discretionary energy beyond formal role expectations. Helping behavior reflects mutual assistance among colleagues within social networks, while voice behavior represents an investment of personal cognitive resources to optimize the collective welfare of the enterprise.

3. Theory of Psychological Safety (Edmondson, 1999)

The realization of voice behavior depends heavily on interpersonal risk management. Amy Edmondson’s concept of psychological safety clarifies why helping and voice possess distinct psychological antecedents. Helping is generally low-risk; it is consistently reinforced by interpersonal goodwill. In contrast, voice threatens the psychological equilibrium of colleagues and leaders by pointing out flaws. Hence, voice requires higher levels of perceived environmental safety, personal agency, and proactive personality.

4. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty Model (1970)

Albert Hirschman originally operationalized voice as an alternative to departure (“exit”) when organizational decline occurs. Van Dyne and LePine modernized this paradigm, redefining voice not as a reactive grievance or complaint mechanism, but as an affirmative, proactive organizational improvement strategy aimed at forward-looking innovation.

7. Validity

Extensive psychometric investigations have established robust evidence for the construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the Helping and Voice Behaviors scale across diverse organizational settings and multi-rater contexts.

Construct and Discriminant Validity

In the seminal validation study by Van Dyne and LePine (1998), confirmatory factor analyses systematically compared nested models to confirm the distinctiveness of helping, voice, and in-role performance. A three-factor model separating helping behaviors, voice behaviors, and in-role behaviors demonstrated superior fit compared to single-factor or two-factor models across self, peer, and supervisory assessment data:

• The three-factor solution yielded significantly lower chi-square values compared to alternative models combining helping and voice into a single general citizenship factor ($\Delta \chi^2$ tests were statistically significant at $p < .001$).
• Intercorrelations between the latent factors of helping and voice were moderate ($r = .40$ to $.60$), confirming that while both represent prosocial extra-role efforts, they are conceptually and empirically non-redundant.

Convergent and Multi-Source Agreement

The scale demonstrates convergence across distinct rater perspectives. In Van Dyne and LePine’s longitudinal field sample of 95 work groups spanning multiple industrial sectors:

• Statistically significant positive correlations were established across raters: self-ratings of helping and voice converged positively with peer ratings ($r = .25$ to $.35$, $p < .01$) and supervisor ratings ($r = .22$ to $.34$, $p < .01$).
• Peer ratings and supervisory ratings exhibited substantial inter-rater convergence, with cross-source correlations exceeding $.45$ ($p < .001$).
• Within-group agreement among multiple peers evaluating the same target employee was strong, demonstrating an average intra-class correlation ($r_{wg}$) of .85 (range: .77 to .89), indicating high consensus among coworkers.

Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity

Helping and voice behaviors exhibit distinct patterns of nomological relationships with demographic, cognitive, and performance variables:

• Helping Behavior: Correlated positively with overall task performance ratings ($r = .30$ to $.42$). It displayed weaker relationships with education level and status hierarchies, demonstrating that helping functions as a pervasive social resource across all organizational strata.
• Voice Behavior: Correlated positively with employee education level, job level/rank, and proactive personality, but exhibited negative associations with organizational tenure and age in specific supervisory models, indicating that voice is frequently exercised by higher-educated, change-oriented employees striving to establish modern workflows.
• Longitudinal predictive validity confirmed that peer and supervisory ratings of voice and helping gathered at Time 1 significantly predicted objective overall job performance ratings and promotion potential assessed six months later (Time 2).

8. Reliability

The Helping and Voice Behaviors scale demonstrates high internal consistency and temporal stability across a wide variety of administrative configurations, rater sources, and sample cohorts.

Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha)

In the original empirical investigations documented by Van Dyne and LePine (1998), internal consistency coefficients (Cronbach’s alpha) across both dimensions exceeded the conventional psychometric threshold of .70 across all assessment modalities:

• Helping Subscale (7 items):
  • Self-report ratings: $lpha = .85$ to $.88$
  • Peer ratings: $lpha = .91$ to $.95$
  • Supervisor ratings: $lpha = .92$ to $.95$
• Voice Subscale (6 items):
  • Self-report ratings: $lpha = .82$ to $.89$
  • Peer ratings: $lpha = .88$ to $.95$
  • Supervisor ratings: $lpha = .90$ to $.96$

Subsequent organizational studies using the scale across diverse global sectors (e.g., healthcare, higher education, manufacturing, software engineering) have reported composite reliabilities and Cronbach’s alphas uniformly situated between .84 and .94.

Test-Retest Reliability and Temporal Stability

Temporal stability was evaluated across a six-month interval between primary measurement (Time 1) and follow-up measurement (Time 2) among matched employees and supervisors. Test-retest reliability coefficients demonstrated stable behavioral patterns over time:

• Helping behaviors: $r_{tt} = .81$ ($p < .001$)
• Voice behaviors: $r_{tt} = .78$ ($p < .001$)

These coefficients verify that while helping and voice are adaptable behaviors influenced by changing contextual cues, they also capture stable behavioral habits within a given organizational role.

9. Factor Analysis

The factorial validity of the Helping and Voice Behaviors scale has been established using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic methodologies.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Architecture

Van Dyne and LePine (1998) examined the underlying latent dimensional architecture using structural equation modeling. CFA was conducted on covariance matrices derived from self, peer, and supervisor evaluations to determine whether helping and voice formed a unitary construct or two separate dimensions, and whether they were distinct from in-role job performance.

The hypothesized three-factor measurement model (Factor 1: Helping [7 items]; Factor 2: Voice [6 items]; Factor 3: In-Role Behavior [5 items]) exhibited superior fit compared to all alternative specifications:

• Goodness-of-Fit Index (GFI) $> .92$ across all rater sources.
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ranged from $.93$ to $.97$.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ranged from $.048$ to $.062$.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) remained below $.05$.

Factor Loadings

Standardized factor loadings across all items confirmed strong convergence on their respective latent constructs:

• All 7 items of the Helping subscale demonstrated standardized factor loadings exceeding $.70$ (ranging from $.72$ to $.89$, $p < .001$).
• All 6 items of the Voice subscale displayed standardized factor loadings exceeding $.68$ (ranging from $.70$ to $.91$, $p < .001$).
• Cross-loadings onto alternative dimensions were negligible ($< .20$), confirming clean simple structure.

Measurement Invariance

The researchers conducted multi-group invariance tests across rating sources (self, peer, supervisor) and across longitudinal measurement periods (Time 1 versus Time 2). Metric invariance tests confirmed invariant factor loadings across time and across raters ($\Delta \chi^2$ non-significant), demonstrating that the underlying psychometric meaning of helping and voice remains stable across observational sources.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Helping and Voice Behaviors Scale
• Authors: Linn Van Dyne and Jeffrey A. LePine (1998)
• Target Population: Working adults across diverse industries, occupational ranks, and organizational structures.
• Constructs Measured: Extra-role organizational behaviors, specifically promotive/affiliative behavior (Helping) and promotive/challenging behavior (Voice).
• Number of Items: 13 items total (7 Helping items, 6 Voice items).
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil, computer-assisted web interview (CAWI), or enterprise survey software.
• Multi-Source Formats: Validated in three parallel perspectives:
  • Peer-Report: “This particular co-worker…”
  • Supervisor-Report: Replaces “co-worker” with “subordinate”
  • Self-Report: Formatted in the first person: “I…”
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type response format:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Slightly Disagree
  • 4 = Neutral (Neither Agree nor Disagree)
  • 5 = Slightly Agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Procedures:
  • Subscale scores are computed by calculating the arithmetic mean of the respective items.
  • Helping Score: Mean of items 1 through 7 (theoretical range: 1.00 to 7.00).
  • Voice Score: Mean of items 8 through 13 (theoretical range: 1.00 to 7.00).
  • All items are keyed in a positive direction; no reverse-scored items exist.
  • Higher scores correspond to higher levels of exhibited extra-role helping or voice behaviors.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Helping and Voice Behaviors scale was first published in 1998 in the Academy of Management Journal. The instrument is copyrighted by the Academy of Management (© 1998). Academic researchers and educators are generally granted fair-use permission to reproduce and administer the scale for non-commercial, scholarly research and educational purposes, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is cited.

For commercial assessments, enterprise leadership evaluations, corporate consulting, or inclusion in commercial assessment software, formal licensing and copyright clearance must be obtained via the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) or through the Academy of Management’s permissions portal. No user fee is mandated for non-commercial academic research studies.

12. References

• Blau, P. M. (1964). Exchange and power in social life. John Wiley & Sons.
• Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
• Hirschman, A. O. (1970). Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Harvard University Press.
• LePine, J. A., & Van Dyne, L. (2001). Peer reviews of team members: Factor structure, construct validity, and predictive validity of citizenship and counterproductive behaviors. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(2), 326–336. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.2.326
• Organ, D. W. (1988). Organizational citizenship behavior: The good soldier syndrome. Lexington Books.
• Van Dyne, L., Cummings, L. L., & McLean Parks, J. (1995). Extra-role behaviors: In pursuit of construct and definitional clarity (a bridge over muddied waters). In L. L. Cummings & B. M. Staw (Eds.), Research in Organizational Behavior (Vol. 17, pp. 215–285). JAI Press.
• Van Dyne, L., & LePine, J. A. (1998). Helping and voice extra-role behaviors: Evidence of construct and predictive validity. Academy of Management Journal, 41(1), 108–119. https://doi.org/10.5465/256902

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)