A Study On The Relationship Among Authoritarian Leadership, Employee Silence And Job Performance

Authoritarian leadership can be often observed in enterprises in China. There is high power distance and relationship between superior and subordinate. Meanwhile, the superior often asks the subordinate to obey himself unconditionally and controls the subordinate strictly owing to the concept of “On the statue under humble”, accordingly, behaviors and emotions like compliance,obedience,fear and shame will appear from the employees in reflect to the authoritarian leaders. However, the disadvantage of authoritarian leadership can be obviously seen.As is known to us all that a company with lasting competitiveness depends on the creativity and adaption of employees(Jing Baofeng, 2012), leaders need feedback from employees to judge their decisions. Employees will conceal their real viewpoint in terms of leadership, organization and working atmosphere when meeting with authoritarian leaders, resulting in the lack of controlling(Lind et al.,1988), cognitive dissonance(Morrison et al.,2000),rising anxiety(Zheng Xiaotao,2009) and decreasing enthusiasm for production(Dileep et al.,2015)of the employees. And finally produced negative influence to job performance(Zheng Xiaotao,2009), decreasing creative opportunity(Nemeth,1997) and creativity(Wang,2014) and reduce the organization performance(Madrid et al.,2015).Recent years Chinese managerialists pay more and more attention to studies on localized phenomenon which refers to the relationship among variables based on Chinese culture. Considering Chinese employees as research objects, this paper discusses the mechanism among authoritarian leadership, employee silence and job performance which is of great theoretical and practical significance. After arranging and studying existing researches, we discovered that Cheng(2000) proposed paternalistic leadership ternary model which regarded authoritarian leadership as one of the dimensions, and following authoritarian leadership studies focused mainly on one dimension namely paternalistic leadership. Although paternalistic leadership is widely observed in all kinds of business in our country, which demonstrates the appearance and universality of authoritarian leadership(Yang Xiangzhong, 2002; Xu Yihua, 2005; Zhou Hao, 2006), this approach has its own disadvantages. There is negative relationship between authoritarian leadership and other two dimensions of paternalistic leadership(Cheng, 2000).Dimension of benevolence leadership and morality leadership always interfere authoritarian leadership in actual measurement. Therefore, different people show various opinions towards the relationship between authoritarian leadership and job performance(Qiu Mukun, 2008), authoritarian leadership and between organizational commitment(Cheng, 2002; Li Chaoping, 2007). Based on above, this paper separates authoritarian leadership from paternalistic leadership and takes authoritarian leadership as a independent leadership style which is quite necessary in the empirical study of Chinese enterprises.After summarizing existing papers, this research supposes that authoritarian leadership has a negative impact on job performance by enhancing employee silence, based on which a “authoritarian leadership-employee silence-job performance” theoretical model is set up. This paper selects perception of organizational politics as a moderator between authoritarian leadership and employee silence. Since employee silence is generated from the changes of employees’ psychological, responsibly is introduced to illustrate the relationship between authoritarian leadership and employee silence. Responsibility is more likely to be set as a mediating variable in this stage of study, while it is still at the beginning to take responsibly as a moderator. In terms of the relationship between responsibility and employee silence, there is a moderate relationship between responsibility and employees’ feedback emotion, feedback nature, feedback content, feedback approach with Jiang Weijing(2010) as reference. Therefore, responsibility is selected to demonstrate the interaction between employee silence and job performance. However, the moderate effect of responsibility between employee silence and job performance is questioned by the interviewee during the interview. In his opinion, employee silence origins from despotism of authoritarian leadership and the ignorance of employee benefits in real business, it is more sensible to discuss the role that responsibility plays between authoritarian leadership and employee silence. After repeated negotiation with interviewees and research team, the paper proposes a hypothesis that perception of organizational politics and responsibility will moderate the relationship between authoritarian leadership and employee silence based on theories like Conservation of Resources and Social Exchange, trying to discover the role of moderated mediator that perception of organizational politics and responsibility plays in “authoritarian leadership-employee silence-job performance” model.The original questionaire is formulated based on international and national maturity scales. Scale which Cheng developed in 2000 in accepted in authoritarian leadership part, Zheng Xiaotao’s scales are used in employee silence part and self-rating scale by Wang Hui is adopted in job performance part, Kacmar&Carlson(1997)’s scale which is translated by Qu Jiaojiao(2014) is used in perception of organizational politics part and Morrison&Phelps(1999)’s employee responsibility scale is used to measure responsibility. 201 validated questionnaires are obtained as samples to be pre-tested, integrated with research team an opinions from interviewees, original questionaire is mended and the formal questionaire is carried out. During the survey to employees in various natures of enterprises in Changchun, there are 864 formal questionaires out and 709 in, the returns-ratio is 82%.After eliminating 102 invalid questionaires, and 607 valid questionaires are involved in the sample data, which the effective rate is 86%. Reliability, validity, common method bias test are in data processing. Multiple regression equations are applied to test the mediation effect of employee silence between authoritarian leadership and job performance and the moderation effect of perception of organizational politics and responsibility between authoritarian leadership and job performance. Since the moderation effect of perception of organizational politics and responsibility is significant, a model using bootsrapping method which integrates both mediation and moderation effect is applied to demonstrate the moderated mediator relationship between perception of organizational politics, responsibility and authoritarian leadership, job performance.After the data processing and hypothesis testing, the study concluded as follows:(1) Authoritarian leadership has significant negative impact on job performance, and the impact results fairly to task performance and contextual performance.(2) Authoritarian leadership has significant positive impact on employee silence, and the impact is most obvious on acquiescent silence.(3) Employee silence has significant negative impact on job performance, and the impact is most strongly on disregard silence.(4) The mediation effect of acquiescent silence and disregard silence is established between authoritarian leadership and job performance, and the mediation effect of prosocial silence only works between authoritarian leadership and contextual performance, while the mediation effect of disregard silence is most powerful.(5) Perception of organizational politics has a positive moderation effect between authoritarian leadership and job performance, while the moderation effect of perception of organizational politics is most powerful between authoritarian leadership and acquiescent silence.(6) Responsibility has a negative moderation effect between authoritarian leadership and employee silence, and the effect is most powerful between authoritarian leadership and prosocial silence.(7) The model uses bootsrapping method to integrate both the mediation and moderation effect of perception of organizational politics and responsibility. Difference values of PYX and PYM are not significant, which implies the main effect of the two moderation variables is not significant, and the moderation effect between mediation variable and dependent variable is not significant. Therefore, perception of organizational politics and responsibility can’t affect job performance via the positive effect that employee silence impacts on authoritarian leadership. The conclusion also indicates that in the model of “authoritarian leadership-employee silence-job performance”, the moderation effect of perception of organizational politics and responsibility doesn’t exist between authoritarian leadership and job performance, neither does the effect between employee silence and job performance.As a summary, the theoretical contributions are as follows:(1) In the background of Chinese culture, there is high power distance and relationship between superior and subordinate. The research takes authoritarian leadership as a dependent leadership style, and studies the relationship among authoritarian leadership, employee silence and job performance.(2) Opinions are different on the relationship between authoritarian leadership and job performance, results of this study provide a new reference for the negative relationship between the two variables based on Chinese conditions.(3) The moderation variables, perception of organizational politics and responsibility can be complement to the contingency factors between authoritarian leadership and employee silence.(4) Even though the moderated mediation effect of perception of organizational politics and responsibility is not significant in the “authoritarian leadership-employee silence-job performance” model, the results suggest that perception of organizational politics and responsibility doesn’t have moderation effect between authoritarian leadership and job performance,nor between employee silence and job performance, which also provides an important reference for following researchers.