The mediating roles of psychological safety and employee voice on the relationship between conflict management styles and organizational identification

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between conflict management styles (CMS) used by leaders and organizational identification of their followers as well as to test the mediating effects of psychological safety and employee voice on that relationship.

Design/methodology/approach

Data were collected on site from 1,023 employees in 13 multinational companies in Turkey. The mediating roles of psychological safety and employee voice on the CMS and organizational identification relationship were tested using ordinary least squares regression analyses.

Findings

The results show that cooperative CMS is positively and significantly correlated with organizational identification. In addition, the results of the hierarchical multiple regression analyses support the mediating effects of psychological safety and employee voice with regard to the relationship between CMS and organizational identification.

Practical implications

Given that cooperative CMS are associated with valued organizational outcomes such as higher employees’ commitment, trust and satisfaction in leaders and citizenship behaviors, organizational efforts to foster cooperative CMS should prove fruitful. Moreover, focussing on efforts to improve leader-follower relationship and to create a trust-based work environment could increase the likelihood that CMS will increase level of employees’ identification with their organizations.

Originality/value

The value of this study is its original contribution to the research literature, as no previous studies, which incorporated CMS, organizational identification, and psychological safety and voice behavior as mediating variables were found during the exhaustive literature review.

Citation

Erkutlu, H. and Chafra, J. (2015), "The mediating roles of psychological safety and employee voice on the relationship between conflict management styles and organizational identification", American Journal of Business, Vol. 30 No. 1, pp. 72-91. https://doi.org/10.1108/AJB-06-2013-0040