The Mechanisms Of How Leadership Impacts On Employee Voice Behavior

The organization urgently needs those employees who can play a role of “activeagent”. As one typical type of challenging-oriented discretionary and extra-role behavior,employee voice behavior is valuable for the innovation and development oforganization, especially at the background of financial crisis. Meanwhile, recent studieshave recognized the significant role of leadership in shaping voice behavior. Affectiveevents theory (AET) proposes that specific work events have an impact on the arousalof affective reactions which, in turn, determine employee’s attitudes and behaviors.Based on the AET perspective, the paper further examines the mediating effects ofemployee’s emotion and social identity quality in the relationship between theleadership and voice behavior, as well as the moderating effect of employee’sattachment styles.Data were collected from408employee-supervisor matched samples, the resultsindicate that (1) transformational leadership is positively related to employee voicebehavior;(2) abusive supervision is negatively related to employee voice behavior;(3)transformational leadership is positively related to employee social identity;(4)transformational leadership’s effect on employee social identity was partly mediated byemployee’s positive emtion, but the mediating effect of employee’s negative emtionbetween abusive supervision and employee social identity wasn’t found;(5) positiveemtion’s effect on employee voice behavior was partly mediated by employee socialidentity, and abusive supervision’s effect on employee voice behavior was partlymediated by employee social identity;(6) interdependence attachment style negativelymoderated the relationship between employee’s positive emotion and social identity,overdependence attachment style positively moderated the relationship between abusivesupervision and employee voice behavior. The implications, limitaions and future directions of the study were discussed aswell.