Organizations increasingly encourage employees to speak up, raise concerns, question assumptions, and contribute ideas, yet permission to speak does not necessarily confer the power to shape decisions. This Critical Viewpoint Article examines that gap by distinguishing psychological safety, voice opportunity, managerial reception, consequential influence, and implementation as analytically separate organizational achievements. It argues that psychological safety is indispensable for understanding interpersonal risk but insufficient for explaining whether voiced input gains access to authority, resources, advocacy, or decision processes. The article proposes three original concepts: managed vulnerability, referring to conditions in which organizations invite employee exposure while regulating the channels and consequences of that exposure; consequential influence, referring to the capacity of voiced input to affect what happens next; and performative safety, referring to a mismatch between visible permission to speak and reliable downstream influence. These concepts are integrated in a proposed Safety–Power Reconnection Framework that treats voice as a process extending beyond expression to reception, endorsement, influence, implementation, and accountable feedback. The argument emphasizes hierarchical power differentials, manager threat, voice channel, status, and response capacity as conditions that may alter this process. The framework is conceptual rather than validated. It does not imply that every voiced proposal should be adopted, that nonimplementation demonstrates suppression, or that psychological safety produces organizational performance. Its contribution is to reconnect interpersonal safety with structural questions of power while preserving clear empirical and conceptual boundaries.
