How Should I Speak Up In Facilitating Leader Endorsement? Examining A Dual-Path Model

Facing increasing complexity and rapid changes of current business environments,managers could no longer personally handle everything.Instead,they rely more on non-specified and discrete provision of ideas,concerns and opinions from employees to be adaptive to turbulent environments.With the expectation that employee voice benefits organizations in various positive ways,management scholars conducted numerous research on how to motivate employees to speak up.However,as a critical “connecting shaft” between employee voice and organizational positive outcomes,manager responses to employee voice could not be naturally inferred from current literature.Evidence show that managers frequently reject voices from employees and thus block the value of their voice to organizations.There is a lack of research on why and when leaders endorse or reject employee voice and what employees can do to improve leader voice receptivity.In this dissertation,I propose a model to unfold the psychological process of leader voice endorsement and discuss what employees can do to increase the odds of voice acceptance.Drawing on the dual-path model of persuasion theory,I propose two distinct mechanisms that independently influence voice endorsement: perceived uncertainty about the voice issue and the negative emotion arousal induced by the voice.Accordingly,two voice strategies are proposed to mitigate the unfavorable psychological conditions of voice endorsement: voice readiness and voice lubrication.Specifically,psychological uncertainty mediates the relationship between voice readiness and voice endorsement.Negative emotion arousal mediates the relationship between voice lubrication and voice endorsement.For each path,I also discussed the contingent effects of voice context(i.e.who the leaders are and what the issues are).The path from voice readiness to voice endorsement via perceived uncertainty is proposed to increase when the leaders are high in cognitive closure or when the voice issues are difficult to implement.The path from voice lubrication to voice endorsement via negative emotion arousal is proposed to increase when the leaders are high in emotion sensitivity or when the voice issues involve high level of leader ownership.To test the hypotheses,three studies were conducted using different methods and analytical techniques.In the pilot study,the online surveys were distributed to 274 working adults in order to validate the scales and measures of the research variables.Both EFA and CFA indicated satisfying convergent and discriminate validities of the measures.In study 1,a laboratory experiment was designed where voice readiness and voice lubrication,as two employee voice strategies,were manipulated through video footage.Based on a sample of 124 university students,this study upheld the predictions that voice readiness is positively related to voice endorsement(Hypothesis 1)and such relationship is mediated by perceived uncertainty(Hypothesis 3).Similarly,voice lubrication is positively related to voice endorsement(Hypothesis 2)and such relationship is mediated by negative emotion arousal(Hypothesis 4).In study 2,an issue-based survey study was conducted in a field setting.By interviewing 96 employees and their 34 direct leaders in two high-tech companies,245 real voice episodes were obtained.The questionnaires that developed based on those voice episodes were then sent back to those employees and their leaders.Multilevel modeling was used to analyze the data that embedded in issue in both employee and leader levels.The results indicated that both voice strategies are positively related to voice endorsement(Hypotheses 1&2).Perceived uncertainty mediated the relationship between voice readiness and voice endorsement(Hypothesis 3)and this indirect relationship was contingent on the level of implementation difficulty(Hypotheses 7a&7b).Negative emotion arousal did not mediate the relationship between voice lubrication and voice endorsement,but this indirect relationship was contingent on the level of issue ownership(Hypotheses 8a&8b).This research provides rich theoretical implications of leader response to employee voice.First,findings of the current research clarify both cognitive and emotional psychological conditions as determinants of employee voice endorsement,expanding our knowledge to explain the leader response.Second,this research found that employee's communication skills play an important role in the voice process.Rather than passively waiting for leader to recognize the value of voice,employees should proactively make things happen by improving the quality of voice issue and the expression ways of voice.Finally,this research provides practical knowledge for employees to increase the odds of voice endorsement regarding the choice of an appropriate voice strategy given a particular voice issue and supervisor.In sum,this research advances the voice literature in both theoretical perspectives and empirical approaches.