Employee Voice And Leader's Voice-taking

With the rapid development and change of the world and highly competitive business environment,organizations must create new ideas,keep learning and adapting if they want to develop and compete successfully.This kind of abilities of adaptation and improvement usually depend on continuous and proactive efforts of employees to improve organizational status quo.Voice is such a proactive behavior and it refers to constructive expression of employees related to work issues.For a long time,voice has been considered as a key factors to improve the quality of decision-making and organizational effectiveness.It has many benefits for organization,such as promoting decision-making effectively,enhancing team learning,improving work processes and innovation,strengthening organizational performance,identifying potential problems and so on.In the light of the positive effects that voice can bring to organizations,most of existing literature focus on the antecedents that promote or hinder voice behavior,but they ignore whether leaders take employees' ideas and opinions(i.e.voice-taking).Because if leaders don't accept and adopt them,their positive effect can't work.Therefore,leader behaviors,such as being open-minded,being good at listening,voice taking and so on,are critical to organizational survival and long-term development.Voice and voice-taking complement each other,and voice-taking often determines whether the organization is successful to some extent.But not all of the leaders are willing to take voice.Although researches on voice have derived some researches on response to voice,there is still not enough understanding about the connotation of voice-taking and there is not clear definition on it.Moreover,existing literature does not pay enough attention to the relationship between voice and voice-taking,and there is lack of theoretical basis or the theory is single.Thus,the purposes of this present study are exploring the connotation of voice-taking and leaders why and when taking voice when faced in voice.Specifically,the present study will define voice-taking clearly and develop corresponding measurement scale,and discuss why and when voice(promotive voice and prohibitive voice)will lead to voice-taking.The present study defined voice-taking as a cognitive appraisal process to voice.It referred to leaders' positive respond to voice,which specifically referred to the process that leader provided extra attention and resource support,encouraging voice,soliciting and listening opinions,advice or ideas from employees,analyzing andevaluating them,and implementing rational opinions,advice or ideas in procedure and practice to improve organizational efficiency.In line with this definition,the present study developed a scale of voice-taking by combining qualitative and quantitative methods.First of all,open questionnaire and interview were used to collect the original data of qualitative research and 496 behavior cases of voice-taking were collected.Then,open coding and category coding were carried out to form conceptual dimensions.Then 496 behavior cases were inverted coded and classified according to conceptual dimensions and items were merged and optimized.Qualitative analysis suggested that voice-taking was a cognitive appraisal process of solicitation,listening,judgement and adoption.It included 13 items.Specifically,“solicitation” referred to soliciting suggestions and opinions;“listening” referred to be good at listening and listening to suggestions and opinions;“judgement” referred to analyzing suggestions and opinions and making judgement;“adoption” referred to accepting,taking and implementing suggestions and opinions.Subsequently,the present study conducted quantitative tests.The results of exploratory factor analysis showed that all of the 13 items extracted one common factor.All of their factor loads were greater than 0.6,and the variance interpretation was 66.02%,which suggested that the measurement scale of voice-taking including 13 items had good explanatory power.Subsequent confirmatory factor analysis included construct validity,discriminant validity and criterion validity.Construct validity analysis suggested that the measurement scale of voice-taking including 13 items had good construct validity;discriminant validity analysis showed that there was a good distinction between the measurement scale of voice-taking and other similar constructs,including supervisory responsiveness,voice endorsement,managerial solicitation of voice and managerial openness;criterion validity analysis showed that the measurement scale of voice-taking developed by the present study was effective.In a word,qualitative analysis and quantitative test suggested that the scale of voice-taking had good reliability and validity,and could be used in subsequent empirical study.In addition,drawing on cognitive appraisal theory,the present study constructed empirical model of voice-taking to discuss why and when voice(promotive voice and prohibitive voice)leading to voice-taking.Cognitive appraisal theory suggests that cognitive appraisal is a process in which individuals evaluate stressful events and their potential impact on themselves.It focuses on meanings or significance,including primary appraisal and secondary appraisal.Primary appraisal refers to individual evaluation of whether stressful event will damage well-being.Secondary appraisal refers to individual evaluation of how to coping stressful event.Moreover,affect is is a response when individuals perceive that a stimulus event is beneficial or harmful to himself and perception and cognition are the necessary mediators between stimulate event and affect response.As a stress leaders facing,voice will trigger leader's evaluation.When voice is considered as promoting learning and growth,enhancing personal well-being,it will lead to challenge appraisal.While voice is considered as hindering personal growth and well-being,it will lead to hindrance appraisal.Challenge appraisal can enhance proneness of psychological flow,and then lead to voice-taking,while hindrance appraisal reduces proneness of psychological flow,and then reduce voice-taking.An analysis based on a leader-employee matched sample of 174 employees and 90 leaders suggested that both promotive voice and prohibitive voice positively affected challenge appraisal and negatively affected hindrance appraisal.Because the purpose of both promotive voice and prohibitive voice is to improve organizational efficiency.The purpose of prohibitive voice is to detect and solve problems,which is benefit to improve managerial efficiency,promote leaders learning,enhance innovation and environmental adaptability.Challenge appraisal positively affected psychological flow;psychological flow positively affected voice-taking;challenge appraisal and hindrance appraisal played mediating roles in the relationship between promotive voice/prohibitive voice and psychological flow;challenge appraisal/hindrance appraisal and psychological flow played a chain mediating role in the relationship between promotive voice/prohibitive voice and voice-taking;supervisors' liking played a moderating role in the relationship between promotive voice and challenge appraisal/hindrance appraisal;Supervisors' liking played a moderating role in the relationship between prohibitive voice and challenge appraisal/hindrance appraisal;supervisors' liking also moderated the mediating effect of challenge appraisal and hindrance appraisal in the relationship between promotive voice/prohibitive voice and psychological flow.The research results have considerable theoretical and practical implications.For theoretical implications,the present study discussed voice-taking from leader-center perspective.It was defined clearly and a scale was developed,which were benefit for future study.In addition,the present study provided a new insight to researchers that it considered voice as a pressure faced by leaders.Furthermore,drawing on cognitive appraisal theory,the present study discussed the effect of voice on voice-taking,which extended theoretical basis of the relationship between voice and voice-takingand also extended the framework of cognitive appraisal theory.The research results enriched theory and conclusion of voice and voice-taking.Practical implications include employee and leader two aspects.For employees,They can voice in workplace,but it's better to frame it positively.Voice is more likely to be responded positively when leaders are in positive affect and state,so employees can voice when leaders are in positive affect and state.Employees can develop good social exchange with leaders to reduce relational distance.For leaders,they should do a good job in emotional management,keep positive state as much as possible and deal with voice rationally and carefully so that they will not ignore important information from voice because of bad emotional state and affect preference,resulting in unnecessary losses.