Research On The Impact Of Authentic Leadership On Employee Voice Behavior:Psychological Safety As A Mediator

In the new economic era, enterprises are facing more intense global competition, more complex internal and external environment and the increasing speed of the technical innovation. In order to survive and develop, enterprises must constantly adjust and reform enterprise system, reengineer business process and innovate R & D and production technology. Obviously we can not simply rely on managers to complete the reforms and innovations, only by giving full play to the collective wisdom of all staff that can we better promote the development of enterprises, and employee voice behavior is just an important way to give full play to the collective wisdom of all the staff.However, some employees worry about that their voice behavior may pose a negative impact, so when the enterprises are faced with some important problems, they choose silence instead of voice, especially in China that emphasizes harmony and Zhongyong, voice behaviors from employees are relatively fewer, which is harmful to the development of enterprises. Previous studies found that leader’s behavior is an important factor to affect employee voice behavior, and authentic leadership is a new kind of leadership style. Considering that few researches have focused on the effect of authentic leadership on employee voice behavior, this paper aims to explore the effect of authentic leadership on employee voice behavior under Chinese context.This paper first gives a literature review on the existing researches, finds out the limitations and presents a theoretical model for this study: authentic leadershipâ†'psychological safetyâ†'voice behavior. Gender, education, organization level and length of service are manipulated as control variables. Then hypotheses are proposed. Based on widely-used scales, this paper organizes a small sample test using 60 subjects. CITC analysis and exploratory factor analysis are used to test the reliability and validity of the questionnaire. According to results, a better questionnaire is able to form, which is finally used to conduct a large-scale survey using 300 subjects. Descriptive analysis, correlation analysis and linear regression are applied to examine the proposed hypothesis.Results show that length of service, education and organization level are significantly positively correlated with employee voice behavior, but a weak correlation between gender and employee voice behavior is found. Authentic leadership is significantly positively correlated with employee voice behavior. At the same time, self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing and relational transparency are also significantly positively correlated with both promotive voice behavior and prohibitive voice behavior. Authentic leadership has a significantly positive effect on employee psychological safety. At the same time, self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing and relational transparency also have a positive effect on employee psychological safety. Psychological safety has a significantly positive effect on employee voice behavior. Specifically, it has a significantly positive effect on both promotive and prohibitive voice behavior. Psychological safety has partial mediation effect between authentic leadership and employee voice behavior. Specifically, psychological safety has partial mediation effect between authentic leadership and promotive voice behavior and it also has partial mediation effect between authentic leadership and prohibitive voice behavior.The paper puts forward some management suggestions according the above results. Namely, creating authentic leadership, improving employee’s psychological safety and establishing clear feedback mechanism for voice behavior. Hope to benefit enterprises’ practice. Finally the paper sums up the shortcomings of this study and future prospects.