Empowering Leadership And Voice Behavior:the Mediating Role Of Psychological Ownership

As market competition intensifies and exterior circumstance complicates,more and more managers wake up to the importance of employees' sense of ownership to the competitive edge.However,the increase in staff turnover,low degree of engagement,the frequent appearance of job bias behaviors and anti-production behaviors,have become a great challenge for managers.Therefore,how to enhance the staffs "sense of ownership"(psychological ownership),and thus promote "master behavior" of the staff is a question worthy of study.On the foundations of psychological ownership theory,this study took the empowering leadership as the independent variable and the employees' voice behavior as the dependent variable,and explored the mediating role of psychological ownership in the influence of empowering leadership on employees' voice behavior,and took the internal locus of control as the moderator,to establish the concept model.The questionnaire-based study was grounded upon 221 leader-employee matched samples from technical corporations.The results showed that:(1)empowering leadership was positively related to employee's self-job-concerned voice and self-job-unconcerned voice behavior;(2)both the psychological ownership of organization and job mediated the relationship between empowering leadership and voice behavior,but there were differences:psychological ownership of organization played an mediating role in the influences of empowering leadership on self-job-concerned voice and self-job-unconcerned voice,while psychological ownership of job only mediated the relationship between empowering leadership and self-job-concerned voice behavior;(3)in the relationship between empowering leadership and self-job-concerned voice,the psychological ownership of job has a stronger mediation effect than the psychological ownership of organization.(4)for the employees with higher internal locus of control,the positive effect of empowering leadership on psychological ownership and voice behavior is more significant.Inducing and comparing two mediating effects,this paper not only depicted the relationship between empowering leadership and voice behavior,but also enriched and refined the research of psychological ownership theory.The moderating effect of internal locus of control was also explored,which defined the boundary conditions of empowering leadership's positive effects from the perspective of personality traits.The research herein can enhance the employee's sense of ownership,promote employees' voice behavior and play certain guidance and reference function.