The Influence Mechanism Of The Leader's Reward Or Punishment Omission On The Employee Silence

As a common organizational behavior phenomenon in the world,the employee silence has the negative influence not only to the organization's learning,innovation and the decision-making process,but also to the employee's cognition,attitude and behavior.At present,the employee silence gradually becomes the research hotspot in organization psychology and organization communication field.Based on Taoism,Buddhism,and especially Confucianism,the traditional Chinese culture contains approval of silence,which has ingrained influence on Chinese people's thinking and behavior,and leads to more prominent silence in Chinese employee.Therefore,the domestic scholars gradually pay more attention to employee silence in recent years.The concealment characteristics of silence behavior resulted in the difficulty and shortage of relative study.The theory of "MUM effect" and silence spiral is the early basic theory about silence,and it reflects the psychological mechanism of the formation of individual silence more intuitively.The former reflects the individual psychological phenomenon of reporting only what is good while concealing what is unpleasant.The latter reflects the individual psychological phenomenon of fear about social isolation.Recently,based on the implicit theories of cognitive psychology,implicit voice theory explains the more direct and common formation mechanism of employee silence.The academic circles' empirical study on the antecedents of employee silence mainly includes organizational and individual factors.The organization factor mainly includes the organization system,the management practice,the organization culture and the situation atmosphere.Individual factors mainly include employee self,workmate and leadership factor.The academic community generally considers that leadership is the most important factor for employee silence,and focuses on the influence of leadership style,subordinate relationship or leader behavior.Among them,leadership behavior studies focuses on the influence of leaders' care or abuse behavior on employee silence.This study attempts to explore the formation mechanism of employee silence from the perspective of leader rewards and punishment behavior.Based on the psychological reinforcement theory(or operant conditioning theory),academia and industry generally believe that leaders' reward and punishment is the key factor to mold employee behavior.Organizational behavior scholars focus on the different effect of leaders' contingent and non-contingent rewards and punishments on the employee.However,the measurement of non-contingent reward and punishment is limited to excessive rewards or punishment,and ignores a universal phenomenon:reward or punishment omission.In this study,the concept of non-contingent reward and punishment is extended from excessive reward and punishment to reward and punishment omission,and the mechanism about the influence of the leader reward and punishment omission on employee silence is explored.According to cognitive psychology and common sense psychology,individual's implicit theory is simple idea or belief of some things and phenomena,which is formed in the daily life and has important influence on the behavior of the individual.This research is based on the theory of implicit theory and reinforcement theory,and put forward implicit reward and punishment theory,which is individual's simple opinion or belief about whether he or she should be rewarded or punished under the authority hierarchy.This study argues that the implicit reward and punishment theory'formation is closely related to reinforcement theory's extensive application in education and in organization,and it is the product of long-term reinforcement.In the subordinate relationship of the organization,the employee can form own internal implicit reward and punishment theory through the direct or indirect social learning and social comparison process.Leader's reward or punishment omission behavior is contrary to the employee's implicit reward and punishment theory,which will form perception of advantageous or disadvantageous inequality through influencing judgment of equality,and ultimately affect the employee silence behavior.The results of the empirical study based on the sample of enterprise employees are concluded as follows:1.Both of leader reward omission and punishment omission are positively related to employee silence.Quantile regression further shows that employee of high level of silence is more sensitive to leader reward omission(Except for some extremely silent employees).2.The relationship between reward or punishment omission and employee silence both are partially mediated by employee's perception of organizational politics.On one hand,reward and punishment omission both are positively related to perception of organizational politics.On the other hand,perception of organizational politics is further positively related to the employee's silence.3.Employees' trust in leader not only enhances the relationship between punishment omission and perceived organizational politics,but also enhances the relationship between punishment omission and employee silence.4.The moderating effect of employee trust in leader on the relationship between punishment omission and employee silence is mediated by perception of organizational politics.5.Leader's reward and punishment omission both are negatively related to employees' trust in leader.The empirical analysis of this study failed to support the moderating effect of employees' trust in leader in the relationship between leader's reward omission and employee's organizational political perception or silence behavior.Reason may be that,social exchange relationship between the leader and subordinate in Chinese social context tends to follow the principle of unfairness:the gratitude is greater than the mercy.The employee who trusts the leader is more likely to expect more return from the leader's reward omission.This study has the following management practice enlightenment:1.Leaders should often give the appropriate reward to employees who work with outstanding performance.2.Leaders need to implement reasonable and legitimate criticism or punishment on the poor performance of employees in a timely manner.3.Organization should improve the performance appraisal system and reward and punishment system.Furthermore,enforcement of these systems should also be secured.4.In addition to the implementation of formal system of rewards and punishments,the leader should be good at flexible and appropriate use of informal rewards and punishments.The innovative points of this research are shown in the following aspects:1.In the past,the research on the influence of leader on the employee silence has generally focused on leadership style,superior-subordinate relationship and leader behavior.The research of leadership behavior on employee silence mainly focused on two opposite kinds of behavior which is dominant and motivated:supervisor care and support or supervisor abuse.This study explores the influence of leader's implicit behavior such as reward and punishment omission on employee silence based on the perspective of rewards and punishments.2.Past research on the psychological mechanism about the influence of leadership on employee silence is limited to the perspective of psychological security and social exchange.Based on the perspective of employee's sense making about political intention behind leader behavior,this study explores the mediating effect of employee's perception of organizational politics in relationship of leader's reward or punishment omission and employee silence.3.In view of the weakness of the theoretical basis of the research on employee silence,this study combines the implicit theory of cognitive psychology and behavioral reinforcement theory,and put forward implicit reward and punishment theory.Based on the new theory,this study explores the influence of leader's reward or punishment omission on employee silence and proposes research hypotheses.There are following shortcomings in this research:1.The different type of reward and punishment omission measurement is not included in this study.In the future,we need to develop multi-dimension scale of reward and punishment omission,which should be suitable for Chinese situation.2.The characteristics of variables in this theory model are suitable for collecting data through self-report questionnaire,which may results in some common method variance.However,we adopt some ex ante process control methods in the design of questionnaire.Harman single factor statistical test results show that the problem of common method variance is still in the acceptable range.Future research prospects:1.We can explore the moderating effect of individual characteristics in the relationship between reward or punishment omission and employee silence.The multi-level moderating effect of organizational characteristics should also be explored.2.We can explore the mediating effect of other psychological variables in the relationship between reward or punishment omission and employee silence 3.We can explore the influence of leader's reward or punishment omission on employee performance and explicit behavior,and these result variables can be measured by peers or supervisors.Thus the problem of common method variance can be effectively avoided.In addition,we can further explore impact of the leader's reward or punishment omission on the psychology and behavior of other employees as a spectator.