The Impact of Paradoxical Leadership on Employee Voice Behavior: A Moderated Mediation Model.

Xiyuan Li,Ying Xue,Dong Yan,Hao Liang

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.537756

Abstract

Paradoxical leadership is associated with positive behavioral outcomes. However, the link between paradoxical leadership and voice behavior is not comprehensively studied in extant literature. This paper builds a theoretical model to reveal how paradoxical leadership facilitates promotive and prohibitive voice behavior of employees, drawing upon social cognitive theory and regulatory focus theory. We proposed a moderated mediation model that employees’ voice behavior is related to paradoxical leadership through self-efficacy and psychological safety. With data from 268 leader – employee pairs of questionnaires, this study conducted a structural equation model to test the conceptual framework. The results show that (a) leader’s paradoxical leadership related to employee’s promotive and prohibitive voice behaviors positively; (b) employee’s self-efficacy and psychological safety mediate the extent of effect the superior’s paradoxical leadership has on subordinate’s voice behavior; (c) the more obvious the subordinate’s promotion focus orientation, the stronger the mediating effect of self-efficacy; and (d) the more obvious the subordinate’s prevention focus orientation, the weaker the mediating effect of psychological safety. These conclusions reveal the influencing mechanism of a superior’s paradoxical leadership on a subordinate’s voice behavior. It expands paradoxical leadership-related studies, enriches studies related to the field of “leader – employee voice behavior,” and highlights the relationship between the duality of paradoxical leadership behavior on employees with different regulatory focus orientation with a new perspective.

Highlights

Voice behavior (Van Dyne and LePine, 1998) has attracted plenty of attention in the field of organizational behavior
It discusses how employee self-efficacy and psychological safety mediated and explained it by analyzing the regulating effect of employee regulatory focus orientation and sample data acquired from the survey
It was found that both promotive voice behavior and prohibitive voice behavior can be encouraged by practicing paradoxical leadership, demonstrating positive relationship

Summary

Introduction

Voice behavior (Van Dyne and LePine, 1998) has attracted plenty of attention in the field of organizational behavior. Every employee is supposed to utilize their own wisdom, intelligence, and perform appropriate actions to provide clear advice because empirical studies have found that voice behavior is critical for sustainable development and organizational innovation (Morrison, 2014). Voice behavior may be understood as challenging the status quo and Paradoxical Leadership and Voice Behavior as something that may have negative consequences (Son, 2019). Many employees may be cautious about making a voice behavior, be reticent, or are likely to reflect before offering suggestions. Many scholars focus on researching how to make employees actively engage in voice behaviors (Weiss and Morrison, 2018)

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