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The missing employee voice has become a salient topic in China. This paper aims to document the newest developments relating to the topic by reviewing the recent literature on employment relations and employee voice. The findings of this paper suggest that the purposes of and channels for the employee voice in China have been undergoing significant changes. Different stakeholder groups have approached the issue. ‘Democratic management’ in China, the country’s home-grown concept of employee voice, has been resurrected to encourage more effective employee representation. Apart from this top-down influence from the government and All-China Federation of Trade Unions, this paper also identifies the bottom-up approach driven by the workers, and the external influence from the global corporate social responsibility campaign and nongovernmental labour organizations. Based on the review of the newest developments in workplace democracy and the employee voice in China, this paper proposes a stakeholder framework incorporating these developments. The authors also suggest some directions for future research.

Drawn upon the perspective of implicit voice theory, the purpose of this paper is to explore the underlying mechanism as well as the boundary effect in the relationship between paternalistic leadership and voice behavior.

Multiple-wave survey data from a sample of 368 employees in China were used to test the hypothesized moderated mediation model.

The findings show that both benevolent leadership and moral leadership related positively to voice behavior, whereas authoritative leadership played a negative role in influencing voice behavior. Employees’ implicit voice belief played a partial mediating role between paternalistic leadership and voice behavior. Furthermore, perceived HRM strength weakens both the mediation relationship among benevolent leadership, implicit voice belief and voice behavior, and the mediation relationship among moral leadership, implicit voice belief and voice behavior. However, the moderated mediation effect of implicit voice belief on the relationship between authoritative leadership and voice behavior is not significant.

Leaders are encouraged to behave benevolently and morally whereas to avoid excessive authoritative style at work, so that employees can be encouraged to speak out. Organizations are advised to introduce management practices like training and development sessions and to improve employees’ perceived HRM strength so that the implicit voice belief can be reduced, and the voice behavior can be stimulated.

The research provided a fresh theoretical perspective on the underlying mechanism between paternalistic leadership and employees’ voice behavior by unveiling employee implicit voice belief’s partial mediating role between paternalistic leadership and employee voice behavior. Furthermore, the study contributed to the literature of voice by adopting a more integrative perspective and exploring the role of the implementation of the organization’s system, i.e., perceived HRM strength that provided a boundary condition in the above mediation model.

The aim of this study is to explore and unpack the notion of lateral voice within the context of a Chinese hospital.

A qualitative design was used, involving interviews of 24 medical personnel from a public hospital in mainland China. This included two focus groups (eight participants each) of physicians and nurses, and eight individual interviews with managers, including a chief nurse and directors of the medical centre.

The findings reveal that in top-down contexts with a respect for hierarchy, direct and vertical voice is discouraged but lateral voice fills this gap and can lead in some circumstances to a pathway to collective vertical voice. Interestingly, the study finds that fear of damaging relationships with peers may also discourage lateral voice in some cases, leading to silence altogether. Contradictory lateral voice outcomes arising from employees working within this context are discussed.

The study makes an original contribution to voice literature through exploring an understudied voice target, that is, voicing to peers. In doing so, the study demonstrates the importance of lateral voice as an important component of voice behaviour.

The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of abusive supervision on employees' voice in China's construction industry. Moreover, the authors explore the mediating role of ethics-related self-efficacy and work engagement and the moderating influence of psychological climate in explaining the association between abusive supervision and employee voice behavior.

This study used data in pairs collected from 402 supervisors and employees of construction companies in Anhui, China. In this study, the authors used the time-lag approach to collect data in three-time waves from different respondents. A structural equation modeling (SEM) approach was applied to test the hypothesized model.

The results of this study indicate that there is a significant association between abusive supervision and employee voice. Moreover, the results indicated that work engagement mediated the association between abusive supervision and employees' voice. In contrast, self-efficacy did not mediate the link between abusive supervision and employee voice. Furthermore, results also show that the contingent effect of psychological climate significantly influences the mediating effect of work engagement.

This study also has implications for the construction industry, allowing managers to create a favorable working atmosphere in which employees can reinforce their voices at work.

This study aims to examine the relation between error management culture and restaurant employee promotive and prohibitive voices. Drawing on socially desirable responding theory, the authors also propose a dual-mediation mechanism underlying the impact of error management culture on employee voice: psychological empowerment, as the agentic motive, and psychological safety, as the communal motive.

The authors recruited 223 participants working in 37 restaurants in China for the two-wave surveys with a one-week interval. The authors use a multilevel modeling paradigm to test the study hypotheses.

This research examines a multilevel model suggesting that error management culture can boost employee promotive voice and prohibitive voice via the mechanisms of psychological safety and empowerment. In addition, the results suggest that psychological empowerment (vs psychological safety) has a strong mediation effect between error management culture and promotive voice, but the authors find no difference in mediating effects between error management culture and prohibitive voice.

Restaurants can encourage employee voice by developing and maintaining an error management culture. Organizations can also consider motivating employees from both agentic and communal perspectives. Moreover, managers should focus more on empowering employees in areas characterized by Confucianism or collectivism.

The current research adds to the voice literature by identifying an organizational cultural antecedent of employee voice–error management culture. Agentic and communal motives are two motivational paths of employee voice. It also extends the social desirability theory by highlighting the role of the agentic motive in the Chinese restaurant context.

This study examines the serial mediation mechanism between paternalistic leadership and innovative work behavior through the leader–member exchange (LMX) and employee voice behavior. Particularly, this study utilized the social exchange theory to investigate the indirect effect of three distinct dimensions of paternalistic leadership style on innovative work behavior through LMX and employee voice behavior.

Self-reported questionnaires were used to collect data from 397 employees in Pakistan. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The two dimensions of paternalistic leadership were significantly related to LMX. LMX had a significant effect on employee voice behavior that was further related to innovative work behavior. The findings also support the mediating role of LMX between authoritarian and moral leadership and employee voice. Further, LMX and employee voice boosted the indirect relationship between moral leadership and innovative behavior. However, authoritarian leadership demonstrated a significant but negative indirect effect on innovative behavior through LMX and employee voice.

The organizational members need to encourage a high LMX and voice behavior to enhance the positive effects of benevolent and moral leadership styles on innovative employee behaviors. Contrarily, they need to discourage authoritarian leadership if they want to enhance innovative work behavior through LMX and employee voice. Furthermore, when leaders provide a safe environment to employees at the workplace, then they may feel secure to take risks and exhibit innovative work behavior, which ultimately contributes to increasing employee and organizational performance.

This study extended the existing literature on paternalistic leadership in two important ways. First, this study examined a serial mediation mechanism to test the effect of paternalistic leadership on innovative work behavior through LMX and voice behavior. Second, this is a key study to investigate which dimension of paternalistic leadership is effective to boost employees' innovative work behavior at the individual level in the Pakistani organizational context.

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the mechanism through voice behavior mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and employees' creativity. This study also examines the moderating role of psychological empowerment and innovative climate between ethical leadership and employee creativity.

We used a survey questionnaire to collect multi-wave data from 295 employees working in the IT sector to test the proposed hypotheses of this study.

The findings revealed that ethical leadership boosts employee creativity, and voice behavior mediates the positive relationship between ethical leadership and employee creativity. Moreover, the results confirm the significant moderating role of psychological empowerment on the relationship between ethical leadership and voice behavior. A positive moderation of innovative climate was also confirmed in the association between voice behavior and creativity. Employees with supportive innovative climate adopt creative behavior when they can voice their concerns freely.

Ethical leadership is a vital tool for fostering employee's creativity by providing autonomy to raise their voice at the workplace in the emerging markets.

This is one of the leading researches to emphasize the role of ethical leadership for employee creativity, and the key contribution is to discover voice as a potential mediator for ethical leadership and an innovative climate as a potential moderator in the relationship between voice behavior and employee creativity.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influencing mechanism of coaching leadership (CL) on employee voice behavior (VB) based on cognitive-affective system theory of personality (CAPS). Specifically, the study intends to build a model of psychological security (PS) and openness to change (OC) that mediate the relationship between CL and employee VB at an individual-level and group-level from cognitive-affective dual perspective.

CL, employee VB, PS and OC were assessed in an empirical study based on a supervisor–subordinate dyads sample of 287 employees and 72 team leaders from enterprises in Southern China.

From CAPS theory perspective, the authors found that CL promotes employee VB and that PS and OC mediate the relationship between CL and VB.

Results underscore the importance of encouraging managers to engage in CL behaviors, which are conductive to enhancing employee PS and OC thereby improving employee VB. These results also highlight the significance of managerial attention to a secure voice atmosphere and the improvement of employees’ affective commitment to organizational change.

The research findings provide a significant contribution to the literature in that it shows PS and OC as crucial dual mediating mechanism through which CL influences VB. Moreover, this paper is one of the few studies answering the call to examine the effect of leadership at multiple levels.

Drawing upon social-exchange, social-cognitive and leadership theory, this study explores whether and how a cross-level mechanism connects team-level traditional Chinese leadership (i.e. paternalistic leadership) to individual-level voice behavior.

Survey data were collected from 421 employees of 108 branches of four service-industry chains in Taiwan. Multilevel path models and hypotheses were tested using Mplus structural equation modeling software.

One subtype of team-level paternalistic leadership, benevolent leadership, was positively related to voice behavior, whereas another – authoritative leadership – had a negative relationship to it. Additionally, employees' voice self-efficacy and felt accountability each played a cross-level mediating role between team-level paternalistic leadership and voice behavior.

It is recommended that team leaders behave benevolently, and avoid excessive authoritativeness at work, as this will tend to encourage their employees to voice opinions. Organizations, meanwhile, are advised to introduce training and development sessions aimed at improving both felt accountability and voice self-efficacy among their employees, so that such voice behavior can be stimulated and strengthened.

This study provides a useful social-cognitive analysis of the mechanism underlying paternalistic leadership and employee voice behavior, and specifically, reveals that employees' felt accountability and voice self-efficacy play a mediating role in that relationship. This extends understanding of the leadership–voice relationship and adds value to traditional Chinese leadership literature.