Abstract
Drawing upon the conservation of resources theory, we intend to examine the relationships between voice behaviors and job stressors. Specifically, we propose a non-linear relationship between hindrance stressors and prohibitive and promotive voice behaviors. Furthermore, we argue that challenge stressors moderate the non-linear relationship between hindrance stressors and voice behaviors. Based on a sample of 361 employees in China, our results indicate that the relationship between hindrance stressors and prohibitive and promotive voice is U-shaped. The relationships between challenge stressors and prohibitive and promotive voice are linearly positive. Moreover, challenge stressors moderate the relationships between hindrance stressors and voice behaviors; thus, when challenge stressors are high, hindrance stressors are negatively linear related to prohibitive and promotive voice behaviors, and when challenge stressors are low, hindrance stressors are curvilinearly related to prohibitive and promotive voice behaviors. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.
Highlights
Employee voice refers to constructive change-oriented communication intended to improve the situation (LePine and Van Dyne, 2001)
The results showed that the average variance extracted (AVE) of all variants are above 0.5 and that the composite reliability (CR) of all variants are above 0.8, which confirmed acceptable construct validity (Hair et al, 2010)
Following the COR theory, we examined a U-shaped relationship between hindrance stressors and voice behavior
Summary
Employee voice refers to constructive change-oriented communication intended to improve the situation (LePine and Van Dyne, 2001). Voice behavior is beneficial for highlighting individual contributions (Kwon et al, 2016), improving team processes (LeClair-Smith et al, 2016), avoiding potential crises (Chamberlin et al, 2017), and enhancing organization performance (Hilverda et al, 2018). Job stressors have been regarded as one of the most critical inhibitors of voice behavior, since job stressors are widespread and unavoidable, more importantly; research has found that job stressors are negatively related to major work-related outcomes (Chen et al, 2017). Literature has focused on the relationships between job stressors and voice behaviors (Hu et al, 2018), further research on psychological mechanisms and empirical evidence is still needed (Chen et al, 2015). Challenge stressors refer to job demands that
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