The Relationship Between Organizational Embeddedness And Employee's Voice Behavior

Employee voice is of great significance to organizational development and successful transformation.Researchers and practitioners have paid much attention to facilitating employee voice.Voice can be categorized as promotive voice and prohibitive voice.Promotive voice helps the organization to improve the overall operational efficiency,while prohibitive voice helps identify deficiencies and problems in the organization for timely amendment.Noticing that voice is proactive consumption and deployment of resources,this study focuses on how resource brought by being embedded in social network in the organization-Organizational Embeddedness-influence employee voice.Highly embedded employees have closer and stronger relationships in the organization than those who are lowly embedded,which in turn leads to stronger attachment to those relationships and more difficulty to leave.Organizational embeddedness provides employees resources to voice,and motivates employees to voice to gain and protect resources.Promotive voice and prohibitive voice have different definitions and distinctive outcomes.Organizational embeddedness may have differential effects on employee promotive voice and prohibitive voice.The present study focuses on how three components of organizational embeddedness-organizational fit,organizational sacrifice,and organizational links-affect promotive voice and prohibitive voice respectively.Drawing from the conservation of resources theory and social network theory,this study proposes a theoretical model with hypotheses on the main effects of organizational fit,organizational sacrifice and organizational links on employee voice behavior,and the two-way interactional effects among three components of organizational embeddedness on voice.This study posits that organizational fit is positively associated with employee's promotive voice.Organizational sacrifice positively predicts prohibitive voice.Furthermore,the study hypothesizes that organizational links strengthens the positive effect of organizational fit on promotive voice while it weakens the positive association between organizational sacrifice and employees' prohibitive voice.The study conducted a survey returning a valid sample of 155 participants.The study found that organizational embeddedness plays an important role in understanding employees' voice.Results revealed significant main effects of organizational fit and organizational sacrifice on voice.The attenuating effect of organizational links on the relationship between organizational sacrifice and voice is also supported.However,the interaction effect of organizational links and organizational fit on employees,voice is not significant.Identifying mobilizing and deploying resources as key motives of voice,this study enriches our understanding of antecedents to and moderating variables of voice.The article makes separate predictions for promotive and prohibitive voice due to the distinctions between these two types of voice behavior.Meanwhile,this article also enriches the literature of organizational embeddedness.This article specified the effect of organizational fit,organizational sacrifice and organizational links on promotive and prohibitive voice.Findings of the present study also offer practical implications for organizations.