The Paradoxical Effect Of Integrity-Competence Leadership?

Encouraging employee voice has long been recognized as a key driver of high quality decisions among organizations when adapting to the dynamic business environment.Nevertheless,employees often remain silent rather than speak up to managers with work-related ideas,concerns,and opinions.In order to resolve this matter,scholars have done amount of research about why and how group climate or dispositional factor impact on employee silence.Few previous studies have explored the effect of leadership factors in China.In the Chinese context,organizations adhere to the principle of choosing leader with both integrity and competence.However,the consequences of indigenous leadership that include leader integrity and leader competence remain poorly understood.The present study aims to investigate the joint effect of leader integrity and leader competence on the silence behavior of subordinates and its underlying mechanism.In the extant literature,leader integrity has long been mentioned as a key part of effective leadership and it is negatively associated with employee silence.However,according to previous leadership research,positive leaders' characteristics have possible dark side.It is unwise to believe that leader integrity and leader competence only brings positive outcomes.Thus,I want to explore the impact of leader integrity and leader competence on employee silence.According to the integrative model of organizational trust,I proposed and tested a mediated moderation model in which the leader integrity influenced employees silence,with expert trust and relational trust as a mediator and leader competence as a moderator.The whole research could be divided into two parts.First,in order to explore the moderation role of leader competence,used a questionnaire-based field study involving 282 managers and employees working in 37 organizations in China.Data were collected in three stages in order to avoid common method bias.The results showed that leader competence moderated the negative relationship between the leader integrity and employee silence.However,expert trust and relational trust can not mediated the relationship between the interaction effect and employee silence.Second,a scenario study with 200 China-based employees by using online platform"wenjuanxing".I found that leader competence moderated the negative relationship between the leader integrity and employee defensive silence intention.Relational trust mediated the relationship between the interaction effect and defensive silence intention.Meanwhile,leader competence moderated the positive relationship between the leader integrity and employee prosocial silence intention.Expert trust mediated the relationship between the interaction effect and prosocial silence intention.The findings offered the dynamics between integrity-competence leadership and work outcome of subordinates and can aid Chinese scholars to gain an improved understanding of the possible dark side of indigenous leadership.We also discussed the implications of these findings for theory and provided further practical insights.