The Influences of Leader-Member Exchange on Employee Voice Role Per-ception and Voice Behavior: An Examination of the Moderating Effect of Leader Favoritism

• Main Authors: Yu-Hsuan Yang, 楊于萱
• Other Authors: Hsin-Hua Hsiung
• Format: Others
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/gq5f98

碩士 === 國立東華大學 === 企業管理學系 === 105 === In the research field of LMX, most previous studies advocated that high-quality LMX can bring a lot of positive consequences for employees. Previous research also proposed that LMX level would affect employees’ voice behaviors. However, previous research did not investigate the psychological process from LMX to employee voice behavior. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to examine whether LMX quality would affect subordinate's psychological empowerment and psychological ownership, and whether psychological empowerment and psychological ownership would make employees expand their definition of work role, and finally increase promotive voice behaviors benefiting the whole organization. Previous organizational studies often considered that leader favoritism would lead to negative consequences, but the current study proposes that leader favoritism may have different influences on employees with different levels of LMX relationships. Therefore, this study also investigates the moderating effect of leader favoritism on the relationship between LMX and employee psychological empowerment and the relationship between LMX and psychological ownership. This study used the survey method to collect data at work settings. The participants of this study were employees from three factories (the factories in Taipei, Tainan, and Kaohsiung) of a food processing company. The current study separately designed two subordinate questionnaires and one supervisor questionnaire to collect data at two points of time. At time 1, the first wave of subordinate questionnaire was distributed; the measurement scales included LMX, psychological empowerment, psychological ownership, leader favoritism. At time 2, the second wave of subordinate questionnaire was distributed; subordinates were asked to fill out their role perception of promotive voice. Supervisor questionnaires were also distributed; supervisors were asked to assess their subordinates’ promotive voice. After eliminating the questionnaires which cannot be paired and those with obsessive missing data, this study finally obtained 113 valid paired questionnaires. This study used structural equation modeling to examine the theoretical model. The results of data analysis show: (1) LMX had a significant and positive effect on employees’ psychological empowerment and psychological ownership; (2) psychological empowerment and psychological ownership had a significant and positive effect on employees’ role perception of promotive voice; (3) employees’ role perception of promotive voice had a significant and positive effect on their own promotive voice; (4) leader favoritism had a significant moderating effect on the relationship between LMX and psychological empowerment as well as psychological ownership; (5) employees’ psychological empowerment and psychological ownership had a significant mediating effect on the relationship between LMX and psychological empowerment as well as psychological ownership; however, (6) employees’ role perception of voice behavior neither mediated the relationship between psychological empowerment and promotive voice, nor mediated the relationship between psychological ownership and promotive voice. In sum, this study found that high-quality LMX not only increased employees’ perception of psychological empowerment and psychological ownership, but also made employees enlarge their work role definition. Employees defined extra-role voice behaviors as in-role, and felt that they had obligations to help the organization. After defining voice behavior as in-role, employees would perform more promotive voice behaviors. The examination of the moderating effect of leader favoritism shows that employees with high-level LMX were more likely to perceive psychological empowerment and psychological ownership when leader favoritism was high than when leader favoritism was low. These employees further enlarged their role perception and performed more promotive voice behaviors. Although leader favoritism may result in negative consequences in organizations, leader favoritism in fact may bring positive effects for the employees with high-level LMX, and also provide managerial signals for the employees with low-level LMX.