Voicing concerns for greater engagement: Does a supervisor’s job insecurity and organizational culture matter?

Abstract

Purpose

Scholars argue that supervisor’s job insecurity may affect subordinates’ work engagement. Moreover, this relationship may be mediated by subordinates’ pro-social voice and the relationship between the supervisor’s job insecurity and subordinates’ pro-social voice may be moderated by organizational culture. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is twofold. First, to examine the mediating role of the subordinate’s pro-social voice between supervisor’s job insecurity and subordinates’ work engagement. Second, to test the moderating role of organizational culture between supervisor’s job insecurity and the subordinates’ pro-social voice.

Design/methodology/approach

Data were gathered from employees of a large hospital in India using face-to-face data cross-sectional survey method. To test the proposed hypotheses, ordinary least squares regression analysis was performed on the data obtained.

Findings

The results indicated support for the proposed model in two ways. First, the subordinate’s pro-social voice mediated the relationship between supervisor’s job insecurity and the subordinate’s work engagement. Second, organizational culture acted as a moderator between supervisor’s job insecurity and the subordinate’s pro-social voice.

Research limitations/implications

The results augment social exchange theory by identifying the crucial role that voicing concerns plays in reducing the negative impact of supervisor’s job insecurity on the subordinates’ work engagement.

Practical implications

The study findings encourage managers to create an organizational culture that allows the subordinates to challenge their supervisor’s decisions.

Originality/value

To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, this is the first study to test job insecurity of the supervisors instead of the same respondents as a predictor of pro-social voice.

Citation

Gupta, M., Ravindranath, S. and Kumar, Y.L.N. (2018), "Voicing concerns for greater engagement: Does a supervisor’s job insecurity and organizational culture matter?", Evidence-based HRM, Vol. 6 No. 1, pp. 54-65. https://doi.org/10.1108/EBHRM-12-2016-0034