A Psychological Contract Perspective of Employee Promotive Voice and Promotability

Abstract

While promotive voice is conventionally considered a favorable work behavior to the organization, whether engaging in promotive voice will help employees move up the career ladder is inconclusive across a handful of studies. Drawing on a psychological contract perspective, this study aims to understand why and when employees’ promotive voice can contribute to supervisor-rated employee promotability. We propose that employees’ engagement in promotive voice will strengthen supervisors’ balanced psychological contract with the employees and increase their rating of employees’ promotability, and these effects will be stronger when the employees and supervisors have higher versus lower quality of leader-member exchange (LMX) relationship. Results of a three-wave field study with 281 employees and their 59 supervisors supported our hypotheses. In brief, we found that promotive voice was positively related to supervisors’ balanced psychological contract, especially when the quality of LMX was higher, which in turn, positively impacted supervisor-rated employee promotability. We conclude by discussing the important implications of these findings for theory and practice.