Why and When Leader’s Positive Emotion Promotes Employee Voice Behavior

Abstract

Although researchers have argued that employees often carefully examine social contexts before speaking up, the role of leaders’ emotion has received little attention. Our goal of this research is to address this important issue from an Emotion-as-Social-Information perspective by exploring the effects of leaders’ positive emotion on employees’ voice behavior. By collecting data of 641 daily interactions from 81 leader-employee dyads using the experience sampling method (ESM), we found that leaders’ positive emotion was positively related with employee voice. Further, such a relationship is through employees’ psychological safety via both emotional contagion and signaling mechanisms. Moreover, the effects of both emotional contagion and signaling mechanisms were stronger when leader-member exchange relationship was weak. These findings highlight the important role of leaders’ emotion in voice and also provide insights for when employees choose to speak up to leaders.