Will You Hear Me Now?: Empowering Leadership’s Role in Minimizing Hierarchical Barriers to Voice

Abstract

Organizations adopt hierarchies to promote coordination; however, hierarchies also decrease the flow of critical information – especially voice from lower-level employees to upper-level leaders. Building on relative deprivation theory (Crosby, 1976) and the voice, hierarchy, and empowering leadership literatures, we argue that employees at lower hierarchical levels engage in less leader-directed voice than those at higher hierarchical levels due to reduced agency (i.e., lower perceived voice impact). However, we also propose that empowering leadership can (a) directly increase employees’ perceived voice impact and (b) attenuate the influences of hierarchical position on employee perceived voice impact and voice. As a result, empowering leadership can minimize the hierarchical differences in work units for perceived impact and leader-directed voice. We tested our theoretical model using multi-source field data collected from 531 employees and their leaders in 148 units of a bank in Turkey. We found support for our expectations that, in each unit, more junior employees felt less perceived voice impact and thus spoke up to the unit leader less. However, empowering leadership increased perceived voice impact and nullified the influences of employees’ hierarchical position on perceived voice impact and voice. Results also showed less support for psychological safety as an alternative mediator, and provided robustness evidence for alternative measures of hierarchical differences among employees.