Different Workplace Currencies and Employee Voice: From the Multidimensional Approach of Leader–Member Exchange

Abstract

Building upon social exchange theory and the current voice research, we posit that employee workplace "currencies of exchange" with the leader (i.e., social currency and work-related currency) are key predictors of employee promotive and prohibitive voice. Furthermore, we distinguish between the different roles of social currency and work-related currency in predicting promotive and prohibitive voice, respectively. More importantly, this study further explores the moderating effects of two important individual characteristics, psychological safety and power distance orientation, on the relationships between currencies and voice. We randomly sampled 598 Chinese employees via an online survey platform to test our hypotheses. Our results show that both social currency and work-related currency are determinants of promotive voice and prohibitive voice. Moreover, the boundary conditions for the two kinds of currencies are different. Specifically, employee psychological safety strengthens the influence of social currency on both types of employee voice, while employee power distance orientation could only amplify the relationship between work-related currency and promotive voice. Our research provides important implications for both theory and practice. Limitations and future directions are also discussed.

Strategic leadership and team innovation: a qualitative study from the lens of leader–member exchange

“…, 2008; Landry, 2020). Thus, high-quality LMX helps to provide an avenue for team members to voice their opinions, come up with many divergent views, analyze them and arrive at decisions based on the quality of the interaction between them and their leaders (Zhou et al. , 2020).…”

“…The absence of teams in decision-making has a major influence on an organizational level (innovation outcomes), leader level (trust deficit among team members, commitment to goal issue, high turnover) and team level (team confidence, team recognition) (Gutierrez et al, 2008;Landry, 2020). Thus, high-quality LMX helps to provide an avenue for team members to voice their opinions, come up with many divergent views, analyze them and arrive at decisions based on the quality of the interaction between them and their leaders (Zhou et al, 2020). Therefore, it is necessary to follow both top-down and bottom-up approaches before making decisions concerning innovation in an organization.…”

What is the Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) Theory?

“…The dedication to and continued exploration of leader-member exchange theory reiterate countless advantages of cultivating an effective, two-way relationship. Some of those benefits for members who have a high-LMX relationship include (e.g., Audenaert et al, 2020;Culbertson et al, 2010;Martin et al, 2016;Naidoo et al, 2011;Omilion-Hodges & Baker, 2017;Zagenczyk et al, 2015;Zhou et al, 2020): At first glance, the above list appears to be focused solely or primarily on member benefits. What about the leader?…”

How Does Group Climate Foster or Hinder Employee Voice? A Cross-Level Examination

“…First, research on group-level antecedents of voice behavior is largely limited. Most current research primarily examines the antecedents of voice behavior from the individual level, such as employees' personalities, job attitudes, leadership styles, and leader-member exchange (Ng and Feldman, 2012;Morrison, 2014;Chamberlin et al, 2017;Zhou et al, 2020;Li and Tangirala, 2021). Literature on group-level antecedents of voice behavior is insufficient (Peng and Wei, 2019), especially on group climate, an important voice-relevant contextual factor (Morrison et al, 2011;Frazier and Bowler, 2015).…”

“…According to previous research, individuals' demographic characteristics, including age (e.g., Wang et al, 2014), gender (e.g., Duan et al, 2017), education level (e.g., Zhou et al, 2020), and organizational tenure (e.g., Detert and Burris, 2007), have potential impact on their voice behaviors (Bidwell and Briscoe, 2009;Morrison, 2011;Liang et al, 2012). Therefore, we included these control variables to maintain consistency with previous studies with gender as a dummy variable (0 = male; 1 = female) and education level as a categorical variable (1 = high school or below, 2 = technical secondary school, 3 = junior college, 4 = college and above).…”