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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 complexity and uncertainty of healthcare operations increasingly require agility to safeguard a high quality of care. Using a microfoundations of dynamic capabilities perspective, this study investigates the effects of nurses' implicit voice theories (IVTs) on the behaviors that influence their individual agility.

This research uses quantitative survey data collected from 2,552 Canadian nurses during the fourth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in the fall of 2021. Structural equation modeling is used to test a conceptual model that hypothesizes the effects of three different IVTs on nurses' creativity, spontaneity, agility and the quality of care they deliver to patients.

The results reveal that voice-inhibiting cognitions (like “suggestions are criticisms for higher-ups”, “I first need a solution or solid data”, and “speaking up has negative repercussions”) negatively impact nurses' creativity and spontaneity in crafting solutions to problems they face daily. In turn, this affects nurses' individual agility as they attempt to adapt to changing circumstances and, ultimately, the quality of care they provide to their patients.

Even if organizations have little control over employees' pre-held beliefs regarding voice, they can still reverse them by developing and nurturing a voice-welcoming culture to boost their workers' agility.

This study combines two theoretical frameworks, voice theory and dynamic capabilities theory, to study how individual-level factors (cognitions and behaviors) contribute to nurses' individual agility and the quality of care they provide to their patients. It answers the recent calls of scholars to study the mechanisms through which healthcare operations can develop and sustain dynamic capabilities, such as agility, and better face the “new normal”.

Voice role identification and the psychosocial voice barriers represented by implicit voice theories (IVTs) affect lean team members' prosocial voice behavior and thereby lean team performance. This paper investigates how role definition and IVTs influence individual lean team-members' prosocial voice behavior during lean implementation.

This research was conducted in four case readymade garment (RMG) factories in Bangladesh following a mixed-method research approach dominated by a qualitative research methodology. Under the mixed-method design, this research followed multiple research strategies, including intervention-based action research and case studies.

The findings suggest that voice role perception affects the voice behavior of the individual lean team members. The findings also demonstrate that voice role definition significantly influences individually held implicit voice beliefs in lean teams.

This research was conducted in four sewing lines in four RMG factories in Bangladesh. There is a need for a cross-sector and cross-country large-scale study that follows the quantitative research methods in different contexts.

This research contributes to the operations management literature, especially in lean manufacturing, by presenting the difficulties of mobilizing employee voice in lean problem-solving teams. This work provides new knowledge to managers to address challenges and opportunities to ensure decent work and to improve productivity.

This research raises a key issue of employee voice and its influence on lean performance which addresses two critical areas of employee voice behavior in lean teams: team-members' voice role perception and implicit voice beliefs that influence their voice behavior in the workplace, thereby influencing team performance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the discursive tactics that employees use when they speak up on internal social media (ISM) to gain support for their cause, and how this can develop into a “spiral of voice” when organizational members interact with each other on ISM.

The study is based on screenshots of four months of coworker communication on ISM in a Danish bank and on semi-structured interviews with 24 employees.

Employees succeeded in speaking up and gaining support on ISM by using eight different discursive tactics. These tactics helped move organizational issues from an operational to a strategic level, thus making the issues relevant for management as well as gaining the support of other coworkers. The visibility and persistence of communication on ISM forced managers to react.

Further research should investigate whether similar tactics and reactions occur in organizations with a less open communication culture where it might be less safe for employees to speak up.

Organizations need to be aware of the dynamics of the “spiral of voice” and of the way in which the visibility and persistence of communication on ISM forces managers to handle organizational issues.

This study is the first to explore what happens when employees speak up on ISM and to propose the concept of “a spiral of voice” as an extension of the theory of “the spiral of silence” (Noelle-Neumann, 1974).

As organizational misconduct, fraud and abuse increasingly make news headlines, public opinion is hardening against organizations that engage in illegal or unethical practices. Regulators are now acknowledging whistleblowers as frontline watchdogs, while governments are legislating to protect employees who report illegitimate conduct. However, many organizations are out of step: punishing or ignoring employees who speak up. These organizations run the risk that bad behaviour goes unchecked and that internal whistleblowers take their concerns outside the organization, creating reputational damage and potential legal ramifications. We argue that companies need to get back in step with society by encouraging employee voice as an early internal warning system to detect organizational misconduct. A five-step action plan is presented to enable management to create an ethical environment that encourages, trains and rewards employees to speak up openly about ethical concerns.

This study aims to adopt a follower-centric approach in leadership and ethics research by investigating the impact of implicit followership theories (IFTs) on followers’ constructive resistance to leaders’ unethical requests. Specifically, it analyzes the mediating role of organizational citizenship behavior in the relationship between IFTs and constructive resistance. Indeed, this study aims to examine whether followers with more positive beliefs about the characteristics that a follower should have IFTs are more likely to resist unethical leadership and whether this relationship is mediated by organizational citizenship behavior as volunteering acts that exceed the formal job requirements.

The proposed hypotheses were tested using survey data from 273 employees working in a steel manufacturer company in Iran. The variance-based structural equation modeling technique was used to analyze data.

The results show that followership antiprototype negatively affects both follower’s constructive resistance and organizational citizenship behavior. Furthermore, organizational citizenship behavior mediates the relationship between IFTs and follower’s constructive resistance. Also, both followership prototype and organizational citizenship behavior have a positive effect on follower’s constructive resistance.

Contrary to the dominant leader-centric approach in leadership and organizational ethics research, few studies have examined the role of followers and their characteristics. The results of this study provide important insights into the role of followers in resistance against the leader’s unethical request.

Workplace voice is well-established and encompasses behaviors such as prosocial voice, informal complaints, grievance filing, and whistleblowing, and it focuses on interactions between the employee and supervisor or the employee and the organizational collective. In contrast, our chapter focuses on employee prosocial advocacy voice (PAV), which the authors define as prosocial voice behaviors aimed at preventing harm or promoting constructive changes by advocating on behalf of others. In the context of a healthcare organization, low quality and unsafe patient care are salient and objectionable states in which voice can motivate actions on behalf of the patient to improve information exchanges, governance, and outreach activities for safer outcomes. The authors draw from the theory and research on responsibility to intersect with theories on information processing, accountability, and stakeholders that operate through voice between the employee-patient, employee-coworker, and employee-profession, respectively, to propose a model of PAV in patient-centered healthcare. The authors complete the model by suggesting intervening influences and barriers to PAV that may affect patient-centered outcomes.

Although voice endorsement is essential for individuals, teams and organizational performance, leaders who consider followers' voice to be threatening are reluctant to implement followers' ideas. The authors, taking note of this phenomenon, investigate why leaders who feel a threat from followers' voice exhibit voice rejection at the workplace and when this detrimental tendency can be diminished. Thus, based on the self-defense tendency as per self-affirmation theory, the authors argue that those leaders who experience threat triggered by followers' voice, justify voice rejection through the self-defense tactics: message derogation and source derogation. In addition, the authors also propose that a leader's positive (negative) affect experienced before voice exposure may decrease (increase) self-defense and voice rejection.

To test the authors’ moderated mediation model, they conducted two independent vignette studies (N = 269; N = 208). The purpose of the first vignette study was to test the simple mediation (i.e. the direct and indirect effects), whereas the second study aimed to test the moderated mediation model.

In Study 1, the authors found that the leader's perceived threat to competence provoked by followers' voice was positively related to voice rejection, and the relationship was partially mediated by message derogation and source derogation. In line with this, in Study 2, the authors tested the moderated mediation model and replicated the findings of Study 1. They found that the effects of leader's perceived threat to competence on voice rejection through self-defense tactics are weaker (stronger) at the high (low) values of a leader's positive affect. In contrast, the effects of a leader's perceived threat to competence on voice rejection through self-defense tactics are stronger (weaker) at the high (low) values of a leader's negative affect.

This study suggests that leaders who experience a threat to competence instigated by employee voice are more likely to think that ideas proposed by employees are non-constructive and employees who suggest those ideas are not credible, and these appraisals have a direct influence on voice rejection. However, if leaders are in a good mood vs. bad mood, they will be less likely to think negatively about employees and their ideas even when they experience psychological threats. The findings highlight several avenues for future researchers to extend the literature on employee voice management and leadership coaching by providing theoretical and managerial implications.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the weekly effects of job insecurity on employee voice and silence. Specifically, the authors argue that because employment fulfils important needs, employees’ needs are less fulfilled when they feel that their job is at risk (i.e. high job insecurity). Consequently, the authors argue that employees engage in less voice and more silence because when employees’ needs are not fulfilled, they are less committed to the organization and/or protect their personal resources.

The authors tested their hypotheses in a five-week long diary study among 97 employees.

The authors found that employees reported lower need fulfilment in those weeks and the week after job insecurity was higher, which, in turn, decreased employee voice and increased employee silence in those weeks and the week after.

The study shows that feelings about one’s job insecurity fluctuate from week to week and that the weekly negative effects associated with increased job insecurity can be explained from a needs fulfilment perspective. The study also highlights the importance of studying voice and silence simultaneously.

Managers could indirectly increase employees’ voice and decrease employees’ silence by reducing feelings of job insecurity to increase employees’ feelings of predictability of and control over their future.

The authors studied short-term effects of job insecurity on both employee voice and silence, and examined need fulfilment as an underlying mechanism to explain the effects of job insecurity.

Analysis of employee voice has focused on the reasons and managerial issues regarding the available environment to speak up. The purpose of this paper is to understand the effect of management attitude on employee voice with the mediating effect of individual’s perceived psychological safety (PPS). Besides, the role of job satisfaction (JS) and being individualist/collectivist as moderators over the effect of psychological safety on employee voice are analyzed.

The authors constructed a framework based on Maynes and Podsakoff’s (2014) view that identifies four different types of voice behavior (supportive, constructive, defensive and destructive). In total, 286 questionnaires were collected from employees working in telecommunication industry.

Based on analysis, positive management attitude facilitates supportive and constructive voice (CV) and reduces destructive voice (DESV). PPS mediates the relationship with management attitude and DESV. JS level facilitates supportive CV and reduces DESV. Collectivism level of employees moderates PPS and DESV. Path analysis results showed a similar model for mediation effect of safety, and showed a better model fit and explanation for trust mediation between LMX and supportive, constructive and DESV. Supported assumptions would be discussed-based social exchange theory and signaling theory.

The sample is relatively small which limits the external validity of the findings.

Results revealed the managerial attitude over employee voice through perceived work environment (psychological safety) and trust.

This study is one of the first that integrates not only constructive but also DESV into the model.