When and how does ambidextrous leadership influences voice? The roles of leader-subordinate gender similarity and employee emotional expression

Abstract

In recent years, employee voice has become a popular topic in organizational behavior research. However, existing research has failed to explore when and how ambidextrous leadership influences voice. Adopting leader–member exchange theory and person–environment fit theory, we constructed a moderated mediation model and analyzed the influential path and boundary of ambidextrous leadership on employee voice on the basis of gender similarity between leaders and subordinates. To test our conceptual model, we collected sample in three phases at a monthly interval from multiple employees and their direct leaders from China. Drawing on a paired questionnaire survey of 43 leaders and 182 subordinates, we tested our conceptual model by using polynomial regression analysis, hierarchical regression, and bootstrapping methods. Results reveal that (1) ambidextrous leadership has a positive effect on employee voice; (2) employee emotional expression plays a mediating role in the relationship between ambidextrous leadership and voice; (3) when the gender between leaders and subordinates is different, the mediating effect of emotional expression is strong. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2021.1991433 .