Employee voice is thought to result from a cognitive calculus of costs and benefits. However, it is not known whether and when employees speak up in contexts where the costs and benefits of voice are not readily assessed. The purpose of this research is to answer this question by exploring the impact of employees’ perceived organizational politics (POP)—a social context in which complicated interpersonal relationships make it difficult to predict the outcomes of voice—on promotive and prohibitive voice. Results from an experimental scenario study and a time-lagged field study revealed that POP is negatively related to the two types of voice through psychological uncertainty, even after controlling for psychological safety and felt obligation to voice. Furthermore, job autonomy weakened the negative influence of psychological uncertainty on promotive voice, whereas job security weakened the negative influence of psychological uncertainty on prohibitive voice. Not only do the findings demonstrate psychological uncertainty as a viable mechanism that links unpredictable social contexts such as POP to employee voice, but they also offer insight into the remedies that might mitigate its negative impact. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

How and when does team member voice facilitate team innovation? Integrating research on member voice and a dialectic perspective of innovation, we advance a model in which team member promotive voice enhances team innovation through team knowledge utilization, whereas team member prohibitive voice enhances team innovation through team reflexivity in a nonlinear fashion. We further propose that the differential effects of team member promotive and prohibitive voice will be stronger at different stages (idea generation vs. idea implementation) of the innovation cycle. Survey data from 78 research and development project teams showed a positive indirect effect between team member promotive voice and team innovation through team knowledge utilization, although this relationship was also mediated through team reflexivity. Moreover, the indirect effect of team member promotive voice on team innovation via team knowledge utilization was stronger for teams in the idea generation stage of team innovation. Results also confirmed a nonlinear indirect relationship between team member prohibitive voice and team innovation via team reflexivity such that the positive effects of team member prohibitive voice tapered off at high levels. Contrary to our expectations, the effects of prohibitive voice held regardless of stage. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Unethical behavior in the workplace has been widely reported last decades. In view of its serious consequences, there has been a surge of business ethics research focusing on workplace unethical behavior. Especially, an emerging stream of research has begun to systematically theorize and investigate unethical pro-organizational behavior. In the study, we propose a moderated-mediation model to uncover the underlying mechanism and the boundary conditions of the relationship between high performance expectation and unethical pro-organizational behavior. Drawing upon social cognitive theory, we hypothesize that high performance expectation is indirectly related to unethical pro-organizational behavior through moral disengagement. We further propose that perceived industrial competition strengthens the hypothesized relationship and that moral identity weakens the hypothesized relationship. To test those hypotheses, we collected a two-wave field data, one month apart each other, from a group of Chinese retailing employees. In the first wave, 300 employees from 35 retail stores responded to questions assessing their level of high performance expectation, moral identity, moral disengagement, and industrial competition. We also measured a set of control variables at this time. Two hundreds and twenty-five employees completed the second-wave survey which assess their willingness to engage in unethical pro-organizational behavior. To control for nesting effects, we applied multilevel structural equation modeling to analyze the data. Results showed that high performance expectation was positively related to unethical pro-organizational behavior. By applying Monte Carlo simulation, we found that the indirect relationship between high performance expectation and unethical pro-organizational behavior via moral disengagement was significant. We also found a positive interaction between high performance expectation and perceived industrial competition on moral disengagement and a negative interaction between high performance expectation and moral identity on moral disengagement. Finally, we found that:the indirect effect of high performance expectation on unethical pro-organizational behavior via moral disengagement was stronger when employees perceived a high level of industrial competition; the indirect effect of high performance expectation on unethical pro-organizational behavior via moral disengagement was stronger when employees had a low level of moral identity. Our findings are among the first to demonstrate the dark side of leader's high performance expectation toward subordinates, and explore the psychological mechanism and two key and contrasting boundary conditions. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This paper proposes that the social context moderates the effect of culture on creativity by drawing on the constructivist dynamic approach. We assess creativity by the level of fluency, originality, and elaboration on the usefulness and appropriateness of ideas in three contexts: working under a supervisor, in a group, and alone. We hypothesized that in high power distance cultures, working under a supervisor inhibits creativity, whereas in individualistic cultures, the presence of peers attenuates creativity. Results from two parallel experiments, one in the United States (N = 79) and the other in China (N = 83), partially support the hypotheses. The Chinese originality level was significantly lower when working under a supervisor than when working alone. American subjects generated fewer ideas and elaborated less when working in the presence of peers and elaborated less in the presence of peers than when under a supervisor. We conclude that the social context moderates the culture–creativity relationship by making consensual cultural values more accessible in a social context than when working alone.

This article examined a curvilinear relationship between job insecurity and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Drawing from social exchange theory and research on personal control, we developed and tested an explanation for employees’ reactions to job insecurity based on their conceptualization of their social exchange relationship with the organization at different levels of job insecurity. Using data from 244 Chinese employees and 102 supervisory ratings of OCB, we found support for a U-shaped relationship between job insecurity and OCB. Moreover, 2 factors—psychological capital and subordinate–supervisor guanxi—moderated the curvilinear relationship, such that the curvilinear relationship is more pronounced among those with lower psychological capital or less positive subordinate–supervisor guanxi. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

Employee voice received more and more research attention recent years. Among this line of research, ethical leadership was proposed to be a key variable to motivate employee voice. The purpose of the present study is to examine the relationship between ethical leadership and employee voice. Drawing on the characteristics of employee voice and relevant theories about ethical leadership (i.e., social learning theory, Bandura, 1977; social exchange theory, Blau, 1964), we propose two psychological mediators to clarify the underlying mechanisms of ethical leadership on employee voice: psychological safety and felt obligations. Furthermore, we propose power distance orientation as a boundary variable to understand its interplay with ethical leadership on psychological mediators. Power distance orientation is expected to influence individuals’ sensitivity to the ethical signal of leadership. It helps to illustrate different psychological processes that better explain the mediating model of ethical leadership. A two-phase survey data were collected from 239 Chinese retailing employees. I administered two versions of surveys at two different time points. In the first survey, the focal employee was asked to provide information about ethical leadership, felt obligations, psychological safety, and power distance orientation. Six weeks later, the immediate manager was asked to assess the focal employee’s voice behavior. All the scales were well-established in the literature. The standard translation and back-translation procedures were employed to translate the English items into Chinese by the researcher. Structural equation modeling technique was employed to test the hypotheses about mediation and moderation, while bootstrap analysis procedures were used to test the moderated-mediation relationships among the study variables. Consistent with predictions, the results showed that both psychological safety and felt obligations mediated the influence of ethical leadership on voice behavior. Meanwhile, the results suggest that power distance orientation not only positively moderated the relationship between ethical leadership and two mediators (i.e., psychological safety and felt obligations): the relationship between ethical leadership and two psychological mediators was much stronger for high power distance employees than for the ones with low power distance orientation. Since both significant mediation and moderation relationships existed, I further examined the possibility of a mediated moderation relationship. The results suggest that two indirect relationships (i.e., ethical leadership-felt obligations-promotive voice and ethical leadership-psychological safety-prohibitive voice) were positively moderated by power distance orientation. Collectively, this research extends our understanding of the leadership-voice relationship and specifies how ethical leaders facilitate employee voice. Our study showed that ethical conducts from the power-holders would be important for motivating employee constructive voice, because the ethical type of leadership actively create two necessary conditions for voice behavior: felt obligations and psychological safety. Therefore, the full integration of ethical standards into leadership is not only preferable, but also necessary for long-term organizational innovation and survival. In addition, managers should play a critical role in advancing moral principles, setting moral examples and emphasizing moral persuasion in the Chinese context, where there is likely to be a much heavier concentration of individuals with a high power distance orientation than other places with low power distance tradition (i.e., the U.S.). Otherwise, employees’ u

The present study demonstrates how three psychological antecedents (psychological safety, felt obligation for constructive change, and organization-based self-esteem) uniquely, differentially, and interactively predict supervisory reports of promotive and prohibitive “voice” behavior. Using a two-wave panel design, we collected data from a sample of 239 employees to examine the hypothesized relationships. Our results showed that felt obligation was most strongly related to subsequent promotive voice; psychological safety was most strongly related to subsequent prohibitive voice; and organization-based self-esteem was reciprocally related to promotive voice. Further, although felt obligation strengthened the positive effect of psychological safety on both forms of voice, organization-based self-esteem weakened this effect for promotive voice. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The objective of this research is to examine the joint influence of both organizational characteristics and individual personality on employee voice. Employing a multi-level design, data from a chain of retail stores were collected for hypothesis testing. A total of 267 employees from 59 stores participated in this study. The results offered support for the individual-level relationships among proactive personality, voice behavior, and individual creative performance. At the store-level, both transformational leadership and supportive peer relations exerted significant effects on voice climate, but not on store performance. In addition, negative cross-level interaction between transformational leadership and proactive personality was found for voice behavior. Lastly, implications for managerial theory and practice are discussed.

Drawing on a cross-organizational sample of 163 supervisor-subordinate dyads from mainland China, we examined the moderating effect of power distance and Chinese traditionality on relationships between perceived organizational support and work outcomes. We found that both power distance and traditionality altered relationships of perceived organizational support to work outcomes, in that these relationships were stronger for individuals scoring low (versus high) on power distance or traditionality. We also found that, compared to traditionality, power distance was a stronger and more consistent moderator of perceived organizational support–work outcomes relationships. Implications for management theory and practice are discussed.