An Empirical Research On The Influences Of Authentic Leadership On Employees’ Voice Behavior In Enterprises

With the development of society and economy, enterprises are facing increasinglyfierce competition. How to gain advantages in the severe competition has been gettingincreased attention. Employees’ voice behavior is an extra-role behavior. It can notonly improve the working process, organizational effectiveness and performance, butalso play an important role in improving employees’ creativity and innovative abilityof enterprises. Leadership style is a kind of importantly contextual factors which canwell predict the employees’ voice behavior. Authentic leadership is a new style ofleadership. The relationship between authentic leadership and employees’ voicebehavior is still in the exploratory stage, and it lacks of systematically empiricalresearch.This paper firstly makes a review of relevant theories and literatures of authenticleadership, employees’ trust in leader and employees’ voice behavior and analyze therelationship between them. Next, we study the influences of authentic leadership onemployees’ voice behavior and put forward the theoretical model and hypotheses.Meanwhile, we compile questionnaires and revise them by preliminary test to obtainthe formal questionnaires. We then test the questionnaires and examine researchhypotheses through validity and reliability analysis, correlation analysis, regressionanalysis and so on. The results show that individual factors and corporate factors havedifferent influences on authentic leadership, employees’ trust and employees’ voicebehavior. Authentic leadership has a significant and positive impact on employees’voice behavior. Employee’s trust plays a partially intermediary role between authenticleadership and employees’ voice behavior. Authentic leadership that consists ofrelational transparency, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing has asignificant and positive impact on promotive voice behavior and has a positiveinfluence on employee trust. Employees’ trust has a significant and positive impact onpromotive voice behavior, and has a mediating effect on relational transparency,internalized moral perspective, balanced processing and employees’ promotive voicebehavior. Authentic leadership that consists of self-awareness, internalized moralperspective, balanced processing has a significant and positive impact on prohibitivevoice behavior, and has a positive influence on employee trust. Employees’ trust has asignificant and positive impact on prohibitive voice behavior and has a mediating effect on self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing andemployees’ prohibitive voice behavior.Finally, we put forward some suggestions that managers should create a voiceatmosphere and enhance employees’ trust level so as to improve the current status ofemployees’ voice behavior and organizational performance.