Leader humility and employee voice behavior: The mediating effects of work engagement and cognitive emotion regulation strategies

BACKGROUND: Employee’s expression of voice needs cognitive and emotional resources to express the constructive challenge. Leader humility, with the characteristics of openness to new ideas and feedback, may provide employees with psychological resources to express their voice. This study considers work engagement and cognitive emotion regulation strategies as psychological resources and examines their mediating effects. OBJECTIVE: Referring to the conservation of resources theory and affective events theory, this study aims to examine the mediating effects of work engagement and cognitive emotion regulation strategies on the relationships between leader humility and employees voice behaviors. METHODS: This study conducted a questionnaire survey on managers and employees at travel enterprises in China. Based on a survey of 837 valid questionnaires, participants provided their perception for the proposed research model. RESULTS: The results show that enhancing work engagement and controlled emotion regulation strategies and reducing automatic emotion regulation strategies partially mediate the relationships between leader humility and employee’s prohibitive voice. CONCLUSIONS: Enhancing work engagement and reducing automatic emotion regulation strategies have the mediating effects. However, controlled emotion regulation strategies and promotive voice need much psychological resources, employee adopting controlled emotion regulation doesn’t affect promotive voice and have mediating effects significantly.