Research On The Influence Of Differential Leadership On Employees’ Silence Behavior

Since Chinese society has been deeply influenced by Confucian culture,traditional views such as superiority and inferiority,morality of the mean,and harmony generating wealth have been deeply ingrained.When there is a problem in the organization,although employees have the ability to change the current organizational environment,they selectively keep their suggestions and ideas for different considerations,forming a silent behavior.This is a negative behavior,which is detrimental to the survival and growth of the organization.At the same time,differential leadership with a distinctly selfish style is prevalent in Chinese social organizations.How does differential leadership affect employee silence? This study draws on resource conservation theory and social exchange theory to investigate the effects of differential leadership on employees’ silent behavior.Distinct from previous studies,this study introduced psychological empowerment as a mediating variable to join the mechanism of differential leadership on employees silence behavior,and used both insider and outsider perspectives in the analysis to propose the research hypothesis.In this study,the well-established scale was developed into a questionnaire,and obtains first-hand data through questionnaires,and subsequent data processing and analysis were conducted using SPSS 22.0 and AMOS 22.0 statistical analysis software.From the literature review and data analysis,the following conclusions were drawn from this study: differential leadership significantly negatively affects employee silence behavior,and that the effects on indifferent silence,defensive silence and acquiescence silence differ.Among them,the negative effect of differential leadership on indifferent silence was not verified.Differential leadership positively affects employees’ psychological empowerment,while psychological empowerment significantly negatively affects employee silence.Psychological empowerment had a fully mediating role between the effects of differential leadership on employee silence behavior,in which perceived insider status perceptions played a moderating role.According to the above findings,the positive significance of differential leadership and psychological empowerment in curbing employees’ silent behavior was obtained,and the following managerial insights were drawn from this study:(1)Effective use of differential leadership style to classify and manage employee mobility;(2)Improving employees’ psychological empowerment is of great significance to suppressing employee silence;(3)Managers should pay attention to team management and improve the level of insider identity awareness of team members.