The Influence of Participative Leadership on the Voice Behavior of Public Servants

Abstract

Determining how to stimulate public employees’ voice behaviors has become a critical issue in both theory and practice. This article draws on the theories of participative management, leadership, role theory, and social identity theory and proposes a moderated mediation model to explore the mechanism by which participative leadership shapes public employees’ voice behaviors. To test this study’s hypotheses, we conduct a three-wave investigation of 739 public tax agency employees in the Yangtze River Delta area of China. The results show that participative leadership significantly predicts employees’ voice behaviors by enhancing their organizational identification. Furthermore, power distance moderates the relationship between participative leadership and organizational identification. These findings advance our understanding of how to motivate employees’ voice behaviors from the perspective of participative leadership in public organizations.

Leaders’ induced justice perceptions as mediator of the relation between participative leadership behaviors and team learning

“…It could be expected that employees in high-power distance cultures may be less inclined to express their opinions or engage in participative processes, because of the hierarchical structures where they work ( Hofstede and Hofstede, 1991 ). However, this study aligns with previous research that, even in high power distance cultures, there can be a preference for more participatory leadership when given the opportunity ( Robert et al, 2000 ), and that employees’ justice perceptions at work can be facilitated by participative forms of leadership, as has been noticed in several studies previously conducted in high power distance cultures ( Somech, 2006 ; Parnell, 2010 ; Gupta and Singh, 2015 ; Qing and JinHua, 2023 ). Thus, these studies suggest that leadership styles are not solely determined by cultural norms but can also be influenced by how leaders treat their team members.…”

“…It has been suggested that participative forms of leadership influence employees’ justice perceptions by fostering open communication with their subordinates ( Larson et al, 1998 ; Somech, 2005 ). By enabling employees to voice their concerns and seek explanations regarding their supervisors’ actions and decisions ( Wang et al, 2022 ; Qing and JinHua, 2023 ), and providing adequate justifications or explanations to employees’ concerns, leaders create the conditions for the emergence of positive justice perceptions among employees ( Shaw et al, 2003 ). Additionally, empirical evidence supports that, when employees perceive they are treated with fairness and respect at work, team learning related dynamics and outcomes emerge ( Dayan et al, 2009 ; Akgün et al, 2010 ; Gerlach, 2019 ).…”

“…From a practical standpoint, this study highlights the crucial role of fair treatment in promoting team learning. Lastly, this research explores these dynamics within a moderately high-power distance culture like Chile, shedding light on the factors that facilitate team learning in such contexts (e.g., Robert et al, 2000 ; Parnell, 2010 ; Pillai et al, 2011 ; Gupta and Singh, 2015 ; Anand et al, 2018 ; Qing and JinHua, 2023 ).…”

How positive leadership leads to employees’ interpersonal citizenship behavior: a self-consistency perspective

“…This study adopted time lags of one-month intervals as suggested by previous studies (e.g. Ali et al, 2023;Cheng et al, 2019;Holtz and Hu, 2017;Qing and JinHua, 2023;Yao et al, 2020;Zheng et al, 2022) since a one-month time lag was sufficiently long enough to avoid participants' memory effects but not so long that contaminating factors and respondent attrition became a problem. Finally, response biases related to social desirability, demand characteristics and ambiguity in the measurement items were controlled for by improving the scale items.…”

The relationship between affective leadership and the voice behavior of nurses: A cross-level moderated mediation model

“…Positive styles of leadership, such as participative leadership [17], moral leadership [18,19], and servant leadership [13,20], have been shown to have a positive in uence on employees' voice behavior. Affective leadership falls into this category, prioritizing the interpersonal relationship between superiors and subordinates over the authority of leaders [15].…”