The Mediating Role of Employee Voice between Despotic Leadership, Psychological Empowerment and Employee Performance

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This research effort aims to address the indispensable factor of employee voice, which impacts employee behavior and causes negative emotions. Despotic leadership is a crucial constituent of the workplace and impedes performance-related outcomes. Psychological empowerment facilitates positive behavioral outcomes, including employee voice and performance. This study contributes to the body of knowledge by explaining the role of employee voice in despotic leadership, psychological empowerment and employee performance. The banking sector of Pakistan is one of the remarkable sectors that provides employment and financial services, but it faces various controversial employee issues including leadership, psychological, and behavioral issues that impede performance. This research paper contributes to bridging the research gap in explaining how employee performance is influenced by despotic leadership and psychological empowerment with the mediation role of employee voice. Despotic leadership is an essential element in determining the working environment; psychological empowerment is important for employees’ behavior that predicts employee performance. Most importantly, employee voice has central importance in at the workplace that predicts and impacts employee performance. employee voice creates the working environment that the firm desires. The mediating role of employee voice tends to establish the relationship between despotic leadership, psychological empowerment and employee performance. The current paper focuses on front-line employees of bank in Punjab, as data was collected by employing a simple random sampling technique; the sample size was 310 employees from different banks in different cities. The collected data was later analyzed on Smart-PLS 4.0 for relationship assessment. The results depicted that despotic leadership negatively impacts employee voice and employee performance, while psychological empowerment positively influences employee voice and employee performance and is mediated by employee voice. Limitations and future research recommendations are given in the conclusion section.