Research On The Multilevel Effects Of Positive Leadership On Employee And Group Voice Behavior

As a kind of discretionary extra-role behavior,both employee voice behavior and group voice behavior are important for enterprises to promote product innovation,improve service quality,and improve organizational performance and productivity.However,in the context of Chinese organizations,there is an embarrassing situation where leaders seek voice with eagerness and employees know but do not speak up.Considering the close relationship between leadership and voice behavior,Chinese enterprises hunger for a more appropriate leadership to break this deadlock.Positive leadership may be a good recipe to the current plight of employee voice in Chinese Enterprises.Positive leadership is a new concept of leadership,whose theoretical and empirical researches are still in their infancy.Moreover,the influencing process and mechanism of positive leadership on employee and group voice behavior are not clear.On the basis of systematic review of relevant theoretical literature and in-depth interviews,this study further clarifies the concept,structure and measurement of positive leadership,builds a model of multilevel effect of positive leadership on employee and group voice behavior,then verifies in Chinese business context through using two-wave collected data from a sample of 406 employees matched with 92 team leaders.It is divided into 3 sub-studies as follows.Drawn on social information processing theory,study 1 introduces group voice climate as a mediator to explore the effects of positive leadership on group and employee voice behavior.Results indicate that positive leadership has a significantly positive effect on group voice behavior.Positive leadership has significantly positive cross-level effects on both employee promotive voice and prohibitive voice,while the effect of positive leadership on employee promotive voice is significantly higher than that on employee prohibitive voice.Group voice climate partially mediates the effects of positive leadership on both employee promotive voice and prohibitive voice.From the perspective of self-verification theory,study 2 probes into the cross-level effect of positive leadership on employee voice by taking person-group(PG)fit as a mediator,employee's team identification and group voice behavior as moderators.Empirical findings show that PG fit plays a partially mediating role in the effects of positive leadership on both employee promotive voice and prohibitive voice.Both employee's team identification and group voice behavior positively moderate the relationships between PG fit and employee promotive voice as well as prohibitive voice.In the perspective of social cognitive theory,study 3 uses self-efficacy as a mediator to investigate the cross-level effect of positive leadership on employee voice,and respectively discusses the moderating effects of employee's psychological safety and group voice behavior.Results show that self-efficacy plays a partially mediating role in the effects of positive leadership on both employee promotive voice and prohibitive voice.Both employee's psychological safety and group voice behavior only positively moderate the relationship between self-efficacy and prohibitive voice.This study makes three main contributions: First,it extends the outcomes and mechanisms of positive leadership.Second,it promotes the multilevel integrations of influencing factors and mechanisms of voice behavior.Third,it optimizes the research designs of the effect of leadership on voice behavior.This study also has important implications for business management practices.In order to stimulate voice behavior effectively,the following management measures are suggested: First,using positive leadership strategies to develop positive leadership;Second,providing a climate to encourage and support voice behavior;Third,improving the HRM system from recruitment,training,development and other aspects.