A Role Theory Perspective Of Employees’Voice Behavior:the Effect Of Voice Role Identity

As a way of participatory management, employee voice behavior received extensive attention of the enterprise managers for its function of improving workflow and improving the quality of decision making. But research found that employees do not actively participate in such activities, activities undertaken to encourage employee voice behavior is not satisfactory. Through the review of relevant literature, we find that although there are rich antecedent researches of voice behavior, but when explaining the mechanism of voice behavior it’s still not comprehensive enough. From the perspective of role theory, employee voice behavior is the result of construction and cognition of individuals’ voice role identity. Role theory focused on the role individual play in the process of interaction and its activity rules. It helps to explain and predict people’s social behavior. Although some scholars mentioned role theory related concepts, such as voice role perception, there are no scholars using role theory as a whole framework to study voice behavior, not to mention relevant empirical research. Based on this background, exploring the formation of role identity and its influence on voice behavior has a very important theoretical and practical significance.In this paper, we propose research model under the framework "role expectations-cognition of role identity-role behavior" from the perspective of role theory to explore the influence of voice role identity on voice behavior. We examine the effect of voice role expectations form leader and colleagues in the formation of the voice role identity. Finally, examines the moderating effects of traditionality in Chinese context. Based on questionnaire survey of employees and their direct supervisor from three banks and two hotels in Xi’an, a total of110valid paired samples is collected. This paper draws the following main conclusions:1. Voice role expectations have significant positive effects on voice role identity, namely, both voice role expectations form leader and colleagues can positively predict the employee’s voice roleidentity.2. Voice role identity has no significant directly influence on either prohibitive voice or promotive voice.3. The relationship between employee voice role identity and employee prohibitive voice is negatively moderated by traditionality. Namely, for those individual of high traditionality, the relationship between the voice role identity and prohibitive voice is weaken. Finally, implications for management practices are proposed based on the conclusions, shortcomings and future research directions are pointed out as well.The innovation of this paper is as following:1.Proposing theoretical framework based on role theory to explain the mechanism of employee voice behavior and examining the effect of voice role identity through empirical research. This helps to generate a more comprehensive understanding of voice behavior and provide a new perspective to future research of voice behavior.2. Raising and verifying the hypothesis that employee’s personal traditional values have influence on the relationship between the cognition and role identity and voice behavior under the background of Chinese culture. In a country with a long traditional culture like China, voice behavior will be marked with cultural stigma undoubtedly. This paper confirms that individual traditionality has a blocking effect when employees have to decide whether put forward prohibitive voice or not. This empirical results enrich the organization and management studies under the background of Chinese cultural.