Employee Voice: A Mechanism to Harness Employees’ Potential for Sustainable Success

Hengwei Zhu, Muhammad Kamran Khan, Shakira Nazeer, Li Li, Qinghua Fu, Daniel Badulescu and Alina Badulescu
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Hengwei Zhu: Art School, City College of Huizhou, Huizhou 516000, China
Muhammad Kamran Khan: Department of Management Sciences, Virtual University of Pakistan, Lahore 54000, Pakistan
Shakira Nazeer: Department of Management Sciences, Virtual University of Pakistan, Lahore 54000, Pakistan
Li Li: Design Academy Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Wuhan 430072, China
Qinghua Fu: Department of Business Administration, Moutai Institute, Zunyi 563000, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 2, 1-20

Abstract: Listening to employees’ concerns reduces their dissatisfaction, but moreover, for an organization to achieve sustainable success, employees must raise their creative voice and give their input in decision-making without the fear of rejection in a psychologically safe environment. Ethical leaders facilitate such a participative style of management. A bureaucratic culture, as is generally encountered in Pakistan’s work settings, poses real challenges to those who dare to speak up, therefore the importance of ethical leadership, leader–member exchange (LMX), and psychological safety cannot be neglected as coping mechanisms to sustain the employee voice for mutual gains. To investigate ethical leadership’s mediating mechanisms and boundary conditions on voice behavior, we examined a moderated mediation model with the leader–member exchange as a moderator and psychological safety as a mediator. Grounded in social exchange theory (SET), the current study uniquely posits and tests that employees feel psychologically safe in the presence of an ethical leader with whom they have high-quality social exchanges. Data were collected from 281 employees from the public corporations and private enterprises of the petroleum sector of Karachi. Results of the analysis, through SPSS and AMOS, revealed that psychological safety mediated the relationship of ethical leadership and voice behavior, while the indirect effect of ethical leadership on voice behavior (via psychological safety) is stronger for those employees who enjoy high-quality exchanges with ethical leaders. LMX was also found to moderate the relationship between ethical leadership and voice behavior. Contributions, recommendations, and limitations of the current study and further research areas are also discussed. The study offers practical insight on the mechanism of ethical leadership on employee voice behavior and recommends leaders to develop social exchanges to improve voice behavior for sustainable success.

Keywords: ethical leadership (EL); psychological safety (PS); voice behavior (VB); leader–member exchange (LMX); oil and gas sector (O&G); petroleum industry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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