I Have a Voice: Employee Voice under Abusive Supervisors

Abstract

Given the significance of organizational effectiveness and efficiency in todays hypercompetitive business environment, problem solving skills have been required for organizations to survive. However, there are organizational problems those cannot be figured out from the top management, but rank-and-file employees are much aware of certain issues. Consequently, employees are expected to be more proactive and speak up in their work. Recognizing the importance of employees voice, the purpose of this study s to examine a comprehensive model of employee voice behavior in organizations. First of all, the current research investigates how a leaders abusive behavior may impact followers voice behaviors. Secondly, this study demonstrates mediating mechanisms of employees psychological factors between leaders abusive supervision and employee voice behavior. Third, this paper examines the influence of situational condition by exploring the moderating effects of the situational context, which may mitigate the negative effects of abusive supervision. Organizational support is inspected as a critical boundary factor in two relationships – one between abusive supervision and psychological safety, and another one between abusive supervision and organization-based self-esteem. By analyzing 209 data samples using questionnaires distributed to employees and their immediate supervisors from various companies located in South Korea, this study discovered that abusive supervision was negatively related to employee voice behavior. Furthermore, abusive supervision was also negatively related with both psychological safety and organization-based self-esteem. The negative relationship between abusive supervision and voice behavior was partially mediated by psychological safety and organization-based self-esteem. However, contrary to the hypotheses, moderating effects of organizational support were not supported. Specifically, the negative relationship between abusive supervision and employee voice behavior was strengthened when organizational support is high rather than when it is low. Despite of its limitations such as a cross-sectional design and a potential risk of common method bias, this study enriches our understanding of the mechanism of abusive supervision on employee voice behavior through psychological safety and organization-based self-esteem. By applying theoretical perspectives, the current study examined psychological mechanisms through which abusive supervision leads to negative outcomes on employee voice behavior. The results demonstrate that leadership influence and underlying psychological mechanisms of employees are all significant on employees decision to speak up. Moreover, organizational support could be effective to reduce the negative effect of abusive supervision on psychological safety when the level of abusive supervision is low. Therefore, recognizing abusive supervision as a strong external cue, identifying factors that contribute to abusive leader behaviors and monitoring occurrences of abusive supervision are both important in order to encourage and motivate employee voice behavior.