Leader Openness As A Moderator Of The Approach

One organization's development is inseparable from the employees' creative suggestions.Besides,employees choosing to remain silent about their concerns about organizational performance can also affect the development of the organization.When employee consciously withhold potentially important suggestions or concerns about organizational performance from those who may be able to act on that information,organizational performance would be faced with some uncontrollable potential risks.Thus,how to minimize employee silence behavior is vital to organizational performance.In order to get hold of the factors which lead to the employee keep silence more accurately,the object of our research is to expand current theoretical understanding of the factors which lead to employee remain silent.Drawing on the approach-inhibition theory of power,we argue that an employee's believe about lacking of power in relation to others at work is the key factor leading to the decision to keep silent about the suggestions or concerns which is closely related to their work.In addition,integrating the approach-inhibition theory of power with the research on employee voice,we argue that the relationship between power and employee silence should be moderated by one contextual variable,that is leader openness.While exploring the interacting mechanism between power and employee silence,we adopt the method of qualitative analysis as well as quantitative analysis.Based on the literature review about the relative variables included in our theoretical model,we construct the theoretical model of this study.And then,combined with the questionnaire survey and related data statistics analysis method,we provide empirical test for our theoretical model.The result of empirical analysis suggestion that,low power employee will inclined to remain silent,and increased perceived leader openness reduces the tendency of keeping silent.Our findings suggest that,power is negative related to employee silence,and the relationship between power and employee silence is moderated by leader openness.That is,low power employee will inclined to remain silent while they perceived their leader is reluctant to input.However,the negative relationship between power and employee silence is essentially eliminated when perceptions of leader openness are high.