Reciprocal Effects of Team Members’ Collective Voice and Perceived Leader Voice Internalization

Abstract

Drawing from the social movement and social information processing theory, we investigated the lagged reciprocal relationship between team members’ collective voice and perceived leader voice internalization. We predicted that team members’ collective voice (collective promotive voice and collective prohibitive voice) is positively related to their perceptions of leader voice internalization and that conversely perceived leader voice internalization is positively related to the collective voice. We tested our hypotheses with a longitudinal study of 554 individual employees of 71 teams who were assessed 5 times over a 5-month period. Findings from the results showed that team members’ collective promotive voice (but not collective prohibitive voice) predicted the subsequent perceived leader voice internalization, and team members’ perceived leader voice internalization predicted the subsequent collective promotive and prohibitive voice. Because the reciprocal effects depict a virtuous cycle with the collective voice, findings provide theoretical and practical importance.