A Study On The Effects Of Empowering Leadership On Employees' Voice Behavior

In recent years,many scholars pay more attention to the analyze of the voice behavior of employees.If the enterprises want to survive and develop in such a fierce competition environment to,managers should take full advantages of the employees in the enterprises.Voice behavior is an active act and plays an important role in the development of the organizations.The voice behavior of the employees has an important impact on the innovative activities of a organization(Le Pine et al.,1998),and the voice behavior can improve and enhance employees' job satisfaction and organizational commitment(Tangirala & Ramanujam,2008).Based on this,it is necessary to explore the impact mechanism of employee's behavior.The study of Organ(1988)suggested,according to the theory of social exchange,organizational citizenship behavior is a kind of willing return behavior based on social exchange,and leadership behavior can greatly affect this kind of return behavior.Leadership style will affect the behavior of employees,because leaders are the object of the voice behavior.When the leaders authorize the employee power,the employee will be rewarded with more organizational citizenship behavior,such as putting more unique insights into the work.Phillips(1997)found that empowering leadership would have an impact on the role of employees.Alge(2006)and other scholars have suggested that authorized employees will show more organizational citizenship.Based on this,this paper mainly discusses the impact mechanism of empowering leadership on the voice behavior the employees.There are some risk of generating voice behavior,so not all employees will put forward suggestions whey they find problems or have ideas for the development of the organization,there are some inherent motivation to make employees willing to take some risk to carry out such behavior.Based on the retrospective analysis of the previous literature,this study attempts to study the influence mechanism of theempowering leadership on the vioce behavior based on the perspective of psychological ownership,and construct the theoretical model of "empowering leadership-psychological ownership-employee behavior".And on the basis of this model,role breadth self-efficacy as a moderator in the relationship between empowering leadership and psychological ownership will be discussed in this study.This study collected data by the questionnaire.Before the formal investigation and survey,a survey of small sample should be done to test the rationality of the questionnaire design,and there were 132 employees completing the questionnaire of empowering leadership,voice behavior,psychological ownership,role breadth self-efficacy.Then,653 employees completed the questionnaire as the formal investigation and survey.The control variables in this survey include gender,age,degree of education,work years,post type,job level and the nature of the enterprise.The data analysis of this study was dealt with SPSS 19.0,AMOS 17.0 and Bootstrap,after the data processing,the theoretical model could be tested.There are several main conclusions:(1)Empowering leadership could significantly predict the voice behavior of employees,and the empowering leadership could significantly predict the promotive behavior and the prohibitive voice.That is,the higher empowering leadership is,the greater the possibility of voice behavior.(2)Psychological ownership effects the relationship between empowering leadership and voice behavior as a partial mediator.Analysis showed that high empowering leadership was related to high psychological ownership,and high psychological ownership in turn predicted high level of voice behavior of employees.(3)Role breadth self-efficacy is the reverse moderator of the relationship between empowering leadership and the voice behavior of employees.That is,compared with the employees who have low level of role breadth self-efficacy,those who have high level of role breadth self-efficacy are more likely to generate voice behavior.There are several values of this study:(1)Examining the empowering leadership as a predictor of voice behavior.(2)Recognizing the influence mechanism of the relationship between empowering leadership and the voice behavior of the employees: psychological ownership is a partial mediator between these two variables.(3)Recognizing the contingency factors between the empowering leadership and psychological ownership: role breadth self-efficacy is a reverse moderator between these two variables.Practical implications:(1)Leaders should give the subordinates some power in order to let employees understand the meaning of their work and perceive the important role they play in their organizations.So that they can generate more voice behavior to propose solutions of existing problems or the suggestions of promoting the development of organization.(2)In the daily work activities,managers should allow employees to participate in decision-making in order to enhance the psychological ownership of employees.When the staff have a high sense of belongings to their enterprises,if they find some problems of the organizations or have great idea of promoting the organizational development,they will tend to put forward the questions and suggestions.(3)Managers should be concerned about the employees' level of role breadth self-efficacy.For those employees whose role breadth self-efficacy are low,managers should communicate with them,encourage them,and praise and reward employees' achievements in their work.It can result in a higher degree of self-efficacy and then it is apt to produce more voice behavior.