The Influence Of Workplace Relationship Exchange On Employee Silence

Employees are the group of people who know the company best and their ideas play an important role in the company’s sustainable development. However, in the real workplace, the phenomenon that "employees withholding their ideas" is quite pervasive, which makes the company lose the chance to correct the strategic errors and grasp the innovative opportunity. Studies about employee silence are still in the preliminary stage and in need of further development in China. This research aims to enrich the studies about antecedent mechanism of employee silence from the theoretical framework of social exchange. There are two important social exchange relationships in the workplace:one is the vertical relationship between the leader and the subordinates and the other is the horizontal relationship between the team member and other team members. This research tries to analyze whether the quality of the two relationship exchanges will affect employee silence negatively. At the same time, adding perceived organizational support as the mediating effect to clarify the mechanism forming employee silence.Through combined qualitative and quantitative analysis, the research collects558valid questionnaires from ordinary employees. Using structural equation analysis methods to verify the hypotheses, the research results show that:(1) Consistent with the hypothesis, the quality of LMX has negative influence on employee silence.(2) Inconsistent with the hypothesis, the empirical data shows that the quality of TMX has positive influence on employee silence; the most likely explanation is that under the Chinese cultural context, the high quality of TMX is limited to a certain small circle of people, which hinders the real information exchange at organizational level.(3) Consistent with the hypotheses, both LMX quality and TMX quality has positive influence on perceived organizational support.(4) Perceived organizational support has significantly negative influence on employee silence.(5) Perceived organizational support plays an intermediary role between LMX and acquiescent silence, but has no significant intermediary effects between LMX and defensive silence and between LMX and disregardful silence.The above empirical results present useful management implications. For the leaders, they should understand the impact of LMX on employee silence and expand the scope and level of their LMX relationships consciously. For human resource managers, they should be concerned about perceived organizational support level of employees and reduce the rigid small team exchange culture through effective management practices, in order to create the effectively communicative mechanisms and atmosphere and reduce employee silence.