Employee Voice: A Mechanism to Harness Employees’ Potential for Sustainable Success

Listening to employees’ concerns reduces their dissatisfaction, but moreover, for an organization to achieve sustainable success, employees must raise their creative voice and give their input in decision-making without the fear of rejection in a psychologically safe environment. Ethical leaders facilitate such a participative style of management. A bureaucratic culture, as is generally encountered in Pakistan’s work settings, poses real challenges to those who dare to speak up, therefore the importance of ethical leadership, leader–member exchange (LMX), and psychological safety cannot be neglected as coping mechanisms to sustain the employee voice for mutual gains. To investigate ethical leadership’s mediating mechanisms and boundary conditions on voice behavior, we examined a moderated mediation model with the leader–member exchange as a moderator and psychological safety as a mediator. Grounded in social exchange theory (SET), the current study uniquely posits and tests that employees feel psychologically safe in the presence of an ethical leader with whom they have high-quality social exchanges. Data were collected from 281 employees from the public corporations and private enterprises of the petroleum sector of Karachi. Results of the analysis, through SPSS and AMOS, revealed that psychological safety mediated the relationship of ethical leadership and voice behavior, while the indirect effect of ethical leadership on voice behavior (via psychological safety) is stronger for those employees who enjoy high-quality exchanges with ethical leaders. LMX was also found to moderate the relationship between ethical leadership and voice behavior. Contributions, recommendations, and limitations of the current study and further research areas are also discussed. The study offers practical insight on the mechanism of ethical leadership on employee voice behavior and recommends leaders to develop social exchanges to improve voice behavior for sustainable success.

“Called” To Speak Out: Employee Career Calling and Voice Behavior

This study is the first one to explore the relation between career calling and employee voice and two potential mediators of this relationship, felt responsibility for constructive change and employee optimism about the future. Surveys from 406 employees of a law enforcement agency in the Midwest U.S. were analyzed using logistic regression and bootstrapping method with Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to examine support for the hypotheses’ main and mediating effects. A behavioral measure was used to capture employees’ promotive voice behavior. Results indicated that individuals with stronger career calling were more likely to engage in promotive voice, after controlling for personality, perceptions toward work, and organizational tenure. In addition, career calling was positively associated with both felt responsibility and employee optimism. Finally, felt responsibility for constructive change fully mediated the relationship between career calling and promotive voice. The implications of these findings for researchers and practitioners are discussed.

The Effect of Leader Member Exchange on Voice

The new digital age introduces new challenges and opportunities for leaders to engage their followers in voice behavior. Drawing on the conservation of resources theory, the objective of this paper is to examine the mediating role of employee engagement and the moderating role of the degree of digital communication by conducting two independent studies comprised of 116 and 188 employees. Results indicated that the positive effect of LMX on voice was mediated by employee engagement. Analyzing the moderation effects of the degree of digital communication, we found that the degree of digital communication attenuated the increase in employee engagement associated with LMX. We contribute to the literature on LMX and employee engagement by showing that while voice behaviors are reduced via the increased use of digital communication in the workplace, leaders can leverage digital communications to engage employees with lower LMX.

Hotel Employees’ Voice Behavior: The Role of Paternalistic Leadership and Organizational Identification

This study explores the effect of paternalistic leadership (moral leadership, benevolent leadership, and authoritarian leadership) on hotel employees’ voice behavior and the moderating role of organizational identification. This study samples employees of five-star hotels in northern, central, and southern Taiwan. Purposive sampling is used to distribute 450 questionnaires: 150 in northern Taiwan, 150 in central Taiwan, and 150 in southern Taiwan. The number of valid questionnaires was 359, and the effective questionnaire recovery rate was 79.78%. The analysis results indicate that (1) supervisors’ moral leadership negatively affects hotel employees’ voice behavior, (2) supervisors’ benevolent leadership positively affects hotel employees’ voice behavior, (3) supervisors’ authoritarian leadership negatively affects hotel employees’ voice behavior, (4) organizational identification moderates the relationship between moral leadership and voice behavior, (5) organizational identification moderates the relationship between benevolent leadership and voice behavior, and (6) organizational identification moderates the relationship between authoritarian leadership and voice behavior. This study also proposes managerial implications based on the analysis results. This research attempts to make contributions to the literatures of hospitality and tourism.

Can Insider Status Promote Employee Voice Behavior?

This research investigates employee voice behavior (EVB) as a behavioral consequence of perceived insider status (PIS) through felt obligation behavior. Based on social identity theory, this research postulates that when employees realize that they are an insider, they tend to see themselves as a citizen of an organization and proactively engage in voice behavior. In order to evaluate this relationship, we collected 983 self-completed surveys from participants of public organizations in Fiji. The findings show that as insiders, employees unbegrudgingly engage in voice behavior when trying to provide corrective changes. This relationship was also partially mediated by felt obligation behavior (FOB). Interestingly, this study is the first one to use social identity theory to explain how employees form close attachment to the organizations they work for, driving greater feelings of belongingness and altering their behavior to engage in voice behavior. Therefore, we find social identity theory to be very relevant in explaining the relationship between PIS and EVB through FOB. This makes a significant contribution to the social identity theory. Finally, the current study offers practical implications, limitations, and further research directions.

Employee Voice Behavior of Governmental Organization

Previous research has tested the effect of cultural intelligence on voice behavior by using transformational leadership as a mediating variable.. This study presents a different perspective by using the ethical leadership variable as a mediation. This study examined the effect of cultural intelligence on voice behavior with ethical leadership as a mediating variable. Research data were collected from 492 employees of the governmental organization in Indonesia. The results showed that cultural intelligence had a significant effect on employee voice behavior and ethical leadership which mediated the relationship between cultural intelligence and employee voice behavior. This research can be used as a reference for application in multicultural organizations, especially in the application of voice behavior.

Research on the Influence of Dynamic Work Environment on Employees’ Innovative Performance in the Post-epidemic Era – The Role of Job Crafting and Voice Behavior

In today’s interconnected world, environmental uncertainty is higher than ever. Under the new economic normal, innovation-driven has become the key to the transformation and upgrading of various enterprises. Employees’ behavior affects the company’s innovative performance, but it is also deeply affected by the dynamic work environment. The sudden epidemic has greatly increased the environmental dynamics and uncertainties faced by individuals, and also caused many changes in individual behavior. However, the research on the mediating mechanism and boundary conditions of how the dynamic work environment affects employee behavior and results is relatively few. Based on uncertainty reduction theory and innovative performance theory, and following the research paradigm of “environment-behavior-performance,” a moderated mediation model with job crafting as the mediating variable and voice behavior as the moderating variable is constructed. Through the statistical analysis of 210 valid questionnaires for employees in different types of enterprises, the mechanism of how the dynamic work environment affects innovative performance by promoting employees to carry out job crafting is discussed. According to the test results, the dynamic work environment has a significant positive impact on individual innovative performance, and job crafting plays a mediating role in the relationship between the two. In addition, voice behavior positively moderate the relationship between dynamic work environment and job crafting, and the indirect relationship between dynamic work environment and innovative performance through job crafting.

An Empirical Study of the Effect of Communication Visibility on Innovation Behavior

The effect of communication visibility on employee behaviors has garnered attention for the widespread use of enterprise social media; yet, this research has rarely considered the typical employee behavior of innovation behavior. This paper explores the relationship between communication visibility and innovation behavior. In addition, the underlying mechanism and boundary conditions are examined drawing on communication visibility theory, regulatory focus theory, and voice literature. Data were collected in a field experiment from a Chinese enterprise. It was found that communication visibility was positively associated with innovation behavior, and the positive association was mediated by voice behavior. Meanwhile, the positive indirect effect of communication visibility on employee innovation behavior was strengthened by promotion regulatory focus. Our research expands our understanding of the outcome behaviors of communication visibility and provides valuable management implications by shedding light on measures to promote innovation behavior.