Effects Of Supervisor’s Voice Responsiveness On Employee Proactive Behavior—the Mediating Role Of Relational Energy

Given that employee voice can provide valuable improvements for organizational development,one of the key responsibilities of leaders is to be a voice manager and actively identify and manage employee voice.Whether the leader can include the subordinates’ opinions will have a significant impact on the effectiveness of the team decision-making and the overall operation of the team.Although there were many research focusing on the anticipates of employee voice,how leaders would respond to employee voice was still underexplored.This paper focuses on what effects would leaders’ positive responsiveness exert on voicers.The leader’s voice responsiveness is actually a key factor affecting employee consequent behavior,but research on its subsequent impacts has not emerged until recent years.What is more,these research have mainly focused on outcomes like employee’s consequent voice and employee status.Research on the spillover effects and the impact on employee’s other extra-role behavior is scarce.The role of leadership in the motivational process of proactive behavior has been a key topic in management field.This paper states that the positive outcomes of leader responsiveness is not limited to voice behavior,but can also extend to proactive behavior.Based on the perspective of resource conservation theory,this paper explores the spillover effects of leader’s voice responsiveness on employee proactive behavior as well as the underlying mechanism and the possible contingency factor.In the second chapter,this paper introduces the concept,measurement and the application of leader’s voice responsiveness,relationship energy,employee proactive behavior and authoritarian leadership.Finally,based on the review and summary of previous literature,this research reviews the research gap in voice responsiveness literature.Then in the second chapter,this paper introduces the resource conservation theory,based on which this paper proposes an overall model and hypothesis accordingly.Based on resource conservation theory,the third chapter hypothesizes that leader voice responsiveness will have a positive effect on employee proactive behavior.In particular,positive voice responsiveness will initiate more relational energy in communicating process,and employee,once perceived such energy,will employ it to do more proactive behavior.In addition,based on paradox theory,authoritarian leadership may play a moderating role in the process mentioned above—when the leaders of high-level authoritarian leadership style respond positively to employee voice,the subordinates will generate more relationship energy and thus conduce more proactive behavior.This paper proposes that the contradictory philosophy of Chinese culture can provide a good explanation.This paper adopted the questionnaire survey to test the proposed hypothesis.Specifically,306 employees nested in 82 teams consist of our leader-subordinate pair samples.This paper describes the research method and the quantitative analysis process in detail.All the hypothesis proposed in the third chapter were verified.Relationship energy played a mediating role between leader voice responsiveness and employee proactive behavior;compared to the leader of low authoritarian leadership style,the positive influence of leader responsiveness with high authoritarian leadership style on employee outcome would be better.Finally,based on our findings,the last chapter gives a general discussion and conclusion of this research,and figures out the limitations of the research and directions for future research.