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.
Highlights
We add to the recent literature on ethical leadership and voice behavior in seven ways: (i) We bring literature together with related theories by examining ethical leadership and psychological safety as determinants of voice behavior. (ii) We extend the model by integrating ethical leadership and leader–member exchange (LMX) and psychological safety that might be stimulated by the interaction of ethical leadership and LMX
As our data came from one common source in a self-rated mode, it was inclined to have priming effects, so evaluation apprehension and socially desirable responses might have contributed to common method variance (CMV) [98]
By demonstrating Psychological safety (PS) as a significant mediator, our research identifies a proximal antecedent of voice behavior that can be enhanced through Ethical leadership (EL) practices
Summary
An organization cannot indefinitely avoid changes under the current dynamic and highly competitive business conditions, and creating and employing new ideas is crucial. Leaders should facilitate the prerequisites to change the status quo, welcome new ideas and help implement those ideas. Developing countries usually practice a bureaucratic style of leadership, in which case management is often disguised as leadership—and even more so in a country such as Pakistan, where high uncertainty avoidance, collectivism, and power distance norms prevail [1]. Research has established that developed countries score lower on the Power Distance Index (PDI) [2] but in developing nations like Pakistan, Int. J.
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