Employee Voice: A Mechanism to Harness Employees’ Potential for Sustainable Success

Abstract

Listening to employees’ concerns reduces their dissatisfaction, but moreover, for an organization to achieve sustainable success, employees must raise their creative voice and give their input in decision-making without the fear of rejection in a psychologically safe environment. Ethical leaders facilitate such a participative style of management. A bureaucratic culture, as is generally encountered in Pakistan’s work settings, poses real challenges to those who dare to speak up, therefore the importance of ethical leadership, leader–member exchange (LMX), and psychological safety cannot be neglected as coping mechanisms to sustain the employee voice for mutual gains. To investigate ethical leadership’s mediating mechanisms and boundary conditions on voice behavior, we examined a moderated mediation model with the leader–member exchange as a moderator and psychological safety as a mediator. Grounded in social exchange theory (SET), the current study uniquely posits and tests that employees feel psychologically safe in the presence of an ethical leader with whom they have high-quality social exchanges. Data were collected from 281 employees from the public corporations and private enterprises of the petroleum sector of Karachi. Results of the analysis, through SPSS and AMOS, revealed that psychological safety mediated the relationship of ethical leadership and voice behavior, while the indirect effect of ethical leadership on voice behavior (via psychological safety) is stronger for those employees who enjoy high-quality exchanges with ethical leaders. LMX was also found to moderate the relationship between ethical leadership and voice behavior. Contributions, recommendations, and limitations of the current study and further research areas are also discussed. The study offers practical insight on the mechanism of ethical leadership on employee voice behavior and recommends leaders to develop social exchanges to improve voice behavior for sustainable success.

Why Employees Experience Burnout: An Explanation of Illegitimate Tasks

“…After filtering and deleting invalid questionnaires that were not completely filled out or selected the same options for all items or otherwise obviously not answered carefully, a total of 459 valid research results were finally obtained from 89 work teams, with a valid recovery rate of 91.80%. The response rate (i.e., >70%) further reduced the nonresponse bias [ 65 ]. Despite the non-response bias, it was felt that the sample provides the mixture of employees from various departments and the number of responses is reasonable to undertake meaningful analysis [ 13 ].…”

Effects of external and internal drivers of individual behavior voice on the moral courage and internal auditors’ effectiveness

“…Because prohibitive voice is involved in expressing opinions on negative aspects in the workplace, internal auditors may perceive that prohibitive voice "carries far more personal risk" compared with promotive voice. Similarly, previous studies have found that prohibitive voice has a stronger relationship with psychological safety than does promotive voice (Röllmann et al, 2021;Zhu et al, 2022). Given prior studies (Kirk-Brown and Van Dijk, 2016) have found that the perception of psychological safety was positively related to organizational commitment, it seems sensible that internal auditors with greater derived social commitment would take a risk to raise up problematic sustainability issues.…”

The mediating role of leader-member exchange (LMX) in the structural relationship between organizational justice and employee voice behaviour in higher education

“…Although each of the aforementioned study variable is not a new-born concept, existing literature comprehend them as critical variable help to sustain organizational success. For instance, employee voice is understood as the sharing of opinions, concerns, and suggestions to improve or recover the current situation going on at the organization [ 1 , [7] , [8] , [9] , [10] ]. Likewise, some studies discussed EVB as a critical factor for organizational behaviour sustainability [ 1 , [8] , [9] , [10] , [11] , [12] , [13] ].…”

“…For instance, employee voice is understood as the sharing of opinions, concerns, and suggestions to improve or recover the current situation going on at the organization [ 1 , [7] , [8] , [9] , [10] ]. Likewise, some studies discussed EVB as a critical factor for organizational behaviour sustainability [ 1 , [8] , [9] , [10] , [11] , [12] , [13] ]. Also, the term organizational justice is viewed as employee perceptions of what is fair and what is unfair in their workplaces [ 2 , [14] , [15] , [16] , [17] ].…”