Synthesis Paper

Leader trust and employee voice: The moderating role of empowering leader behaviors

Liping Gao a,b,⁎, Onne Janssen a, Kan Shi b

a University of Groningen, Faculty of Economics and Business, Department of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior, Postbus 800, 9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands b Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Available online 21 June 2011 This paper explored how employees' trust in their leader interacted with empowering leader behaviors in promoting employee voice. Using data collected from 314 employees in the telecommunication industry in China, we found that the relationship between leader trust and employee voice became more positive when empowering leadership was higher rather than lower. We found this moderating effect of empowering leadership in the relationship between leader trust and employee voice for three different types of empowering leader behaviors, namely, participative decision making, informing, and coaching.

© 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Leader trust Empowering leader behaviors Employee voice

Organizational environments are becoming increasingly complex, dynamic and interdependent. As it is difficult for managers to detect, interpret and handle these challenges all by themselves, employees have been recognized as an invaluable source of comments and suggestions for addressing and solving work critical problems and issues (e.g., Detert & Burris, 2007; Morrison & Milliken, 2000). Indeed, employee input can play a key role in enhancing organizational functioning. However, employees often feel unsafe to express their opinions because they believe that voicing comments and recommendations for change is risky behavior that may challenge the status quo and upset their leader—the power holder of the established framework of thoughts and routines (Detert & Burris, 2007; Van Dyne & LePine, 1998). Given the significance of employee voice and the potential for the feeling of risk associated with it, the objective of the present study was to investigate how employees' trust in their leader is related to their voice behavior.

Perceptions of interpersonal trust allow individuals to accept vulnerability to others and thus promote risk-taking behaviors (e.g., Colquitt, Scott, & LePine, 2007; Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995; Rousseau, Sitkin, Burt, & Camerer, 1998). Based on this central tenet from the trust literature, we argue that employees who trust their leader are likely to feel safe and comfortable about the ways in which the leader will respond to their voice, thereby increasing the likelihood that they will actually engage in expressing their opinions and ideas about workplace issues, actions of others, or needed changes. If they, however, have low trust in their leader, employees may believe that coming up with their concerns and suggestions about critical work affairs is too risky, which may lead them to choose to remain silent on the subject in the workplace. Considering the facilitative effect of trust in promoting risk-taking behavior, the first goal of this study is to build and test the hypothesis that trust in the leader will be positively related to employee voice.

However, while the proposition that trust facilitates risk-taking behavior may be intuitively compelling, we have good reasons to suggest that high leader trust by itself may not always be sufficient to promote employee voice. That is, besides inducing a facilitative effect, leader trust perceptions may also provoke countervailing mechanisms that may inhibit employee voice. High trust in the leader may induce beliefs among employees that the leader has excellent leadership skills and is doing a good job in

The Leadership Quarterly 22 (2011) 787–798

⁎ Corresponding author at: University of Groningen, Faculty of Economics and Business, Department of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior, Postbus 800, 9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands.

E-mail address: [email protected] (L. Gao).

1048-9843/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2011.05.015

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maintaining a favorable work environment, leading employees to feel less urgency to focus on recognizing and voicing problems, irregularities, and possibilities for improvements. Moreover, employees might be concerned that their leader could perceive criticism and comments as a lack of trust in his or her leadership abilities, which might inhibit employees from delivering their voice. The possible emergence of such potential countervailing trust mechanisms implies that more thorough theoretical frameworks including moderators are needed to explain under what circumstances trust does produce the positive effects and when it fails to do so. Seeking to identify boundary conditions, we propose that empowering leadership may operate as a moderator that can neutralize countervailing mechanisms and unleash the facilitative effect of leader trust on employee voice.

Empowering leadership can be defined as leader behaviors whereby authority, autonomy, and responsibility are shared with employees in order to enhance and encourage employees to be more receptive and adaptive to their work environment (e.g., Ahearne, Mathieu, & Rapp, 2005; Arnold, Arad, Rhoades, & Drasgow, 2000; Mathieu, Gilson, & Ruddy, 2006; Menon, 2001; Quinn & Spreitzer, 1997; Srivastava, Bartol, & Locke, 2006). In order to conduct a rigorous test of our proposition that empowering leadership moderates the leader trust–employee voice relationship, we selected three different empowering leader behaviors to investigate, namely participative decision making, informing, and coaching. These leader behaviors are identified and emphasized as important features of an empowering work context for employees (e.g., Ahearne et al., 2005; Arnold et al., 2000; Mathieu et al., 2006; Menon, 2001; Quinn & Spreitzer, 1997; Srivastava et al., 2006). Leaders who employ participative decision making actively seek and highlight the value of employees' opinions and suggestions. Informing behaviors by leaders ensure employees to be aware of the state of affairs in their work environment, while coaching refers to face-to-face communication and two-way influence processes in supervising practices. Hence, the second goal of this study is to test hypotheses predicting that the empowering leader behaviors of participative decision making, informing and coaching moderate the relationship between leader trust and employee voice.

Overall, the present study aims to contribute to the literature by attempting to advance the understanding of the role of leader trust in relation to employee voice. We investigate the direct relationship between trust in leader and employee voice, and examine whether and how three different empowering leader behaviors moderate this relationship.

1. Literature review and hypotheses

1.1. Trust in leader and employee voice

In general, trust has been conceived as the extent to which people are willing to rely upon others and make themselves vulnerable to them (e.g., Frost, Stimpson, & Maughan, 1978; Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2000). Based on this general definition, we define an employee's trust in his or her leader as a psychological state involving positive expectations about the leader's intentions or behaviors with respect to oneself in situations entailing risk (e.g., Boon & Holmes, 1991; Premeaux & Bedeian, 2003). Considering the sources of such trust perceptions, Mayer et al. (1995) provided a model proposing that when followers believe their leaders have ability, benevolence, and integrity, they will be more comfortable engaging in behaviors that put them at risk. Following this theoretical analysis of the role of trust in risk taking, trust is the “willingness to take risk”, and the level of trust is an indication of the amount of risk that one is willing to take (Schoorman, Mayer, & Davis, 2007). Consistent with this perspective on the facilitative effect of trust, many studies have documented that when employees trust their leaders, positive work outcomes result; for example, cooperation (Coleman, 1990), organizational citizenship behaviors (McAllister, 1995), enhanced group performance (Dirks, 2000), and organizational performance (Tan, Davis, Schoorman, & Mayer, 2000). Because speaking up with comments and suggestions about workplace issues can be a risky endeavor, perceptions of leader trust may also play an important role in employees' decisions to voice in the context of the workgroup. Before further exploring this trust–voice relationship, we first define and describe the construct of employee voice.

The term voice originated from Hirschman's (1970) model of exit, voice and loyalty, in which voice referred to “any attempt at all to change, rather than to escape from, an objectionable state of affairs.” Employee voice is a broad and complex construct. Many different conceptions appear in the literature including organizational dissent (Graham, 1986), voice (Brockner et al., 1998; Detert & Burris, 2007; Van Dyne & LePine, 1998), whistle blowing (Miceli & Near, 1985), issue selling (Ashford, Rothbard, Piderit, & Dutton, 1998), taking charge (Morrison & Phelps, 1999), upward influence attempts (Waldron, 1999), and speaking up (Premeaux & Bedeian, 2003). Our examination of employee voice in a trustful and empowering environment led us to choose to focus on voice consisting of pointing out problems and making constructive suggestions for doing things better. This type of employee voice has been conceived as challenging-promotive voice behavior (Van Dyne & LePine, 1998).

Voice behavior has been tied to different targets with scholars and researchers focusing on voice toward peers (e.g., Edmondson, 1999, 2003; Liu, Zhu, & Yang, 2010), toward the supervisor (e.g., Detert & Burris, 2007; Dutton & Ashford, 1993; Liu et al., 2010), or toward the workgroup including peers and the group leader (e.g., Van Dyne & LePine, 1998). In the present study, we examine voice behavior that proactively challenges the status quo surrounding thoughts, processes, systems, and practices established in the workgroup with the intent of improving the situation (cf., Van Dyne & LePine, 1998). Even though it is possible that such voice behavior can be initially targeted towards one or several peers, pointing out problems and suggesting ideas for improvements about the state of affairs within a workgroup will implicate the leader as the power holder of the established framework of thoughts and routines (Detert & Burris, 2007; Van Dyne & LePine, 1998). We therefore focus on examining the role of leader trust and empowering leadership behaviors in relation to challenging-promotive voice behavior that employees enact within the context of their workgroup.

Engaging in employee voice involves a deliberate decision process in which individuals assess the potential benefits and risks (Fuller, Barnett, Hester, & Frey, 2007). On the one hand, voice may lead to improvements that could demonstrate and emphasize

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employees' competence and valuable contribution. On the other hand, employees who express their concerns and suggestions for improvements may confront established systems of beliefs and routines shared in the workgroup. As leaders have usually invested a lot of effort in establishing the current framework of thoughts and practices, they may feel a sense of ownership towards it. Hence, employees who challenge the status quo run the risk of being opposed by their leaders who may prefer to stick to established and familiar practices (Dirks, Cummings, & Pierce, 1996). In such circumstances, voicing one's comments and opinions about the current state of affairs in the workgroup might be interpreted by the leader as disapproval and criticism of his or her managerial competencies, which could damage the employee's image and disturb the relationship with the leader (Fuller et al., 2007; LePine & Van Dyne, 1998; Stamper & Van Dyne, 2001). Moreover, even when suggestions for improvements are welcomed, leaders may take unfair advantage of employees who voice their concerns by using their suggestions for getting problems solved without providing them with the appropriate rewards (e.g., recognition or status) or without paying them back in return with materials they need.

Given the risks associated with employees' voice and due to the power that leaders hold over employees' resources and outcomes, trust in leader may play an important role in employees' decisions to voice their opinions (cf., Premeaux & Bedeian, 2003). In the literature, the arguments for a direct and positive effect of trust on risk-taking behavior are straightforward (Dirks, 1999; Dirks & Ferrin, 2001; Dirks & Ferrin, 2002; Mayer et al., 1995). Specifically, the more employees trust their leader, the more likely they will feel safe and comfortable about the ways in which their leader will respond towards their voice behavior. In turn, this should increase their willingness to actually engage in expressing their concerns and opinions. In contrast, having low levels of leader trust is likely to inhibit the willingness of employees to accept vulnerability towards their leader, which in turn decreases the likelihood that one will take the risk of engaging in voice behaviors. Thus, employees' perceptions of the trustworthiness of their leader should promote their voice behavior. Accordingly, we predict the following:

Hypothesis 1. Trust in the leader is positively related to employee voice.

1.2. Empowering leadership as a moderator

Although leader trust may facilitate employees to engage in voice behaviors, there are several reasons, both theoretical and empirical, to suggest that this facilitative effect by itself may not always be sufficient to promote employee voice. First of all, considering the sources and conception of trust perceptions (Gill, Boies, Finegan, & McNally, 2005; Mayer et al., 1995), employees who trust their leader tend to rely on the leader's ability (perceptions that the leader possesses high levels of leadership skills), benevolence (beliefs that the leader will act in the best interest of employees), and integrity (perceptions that the leader acts in accord with a set of desirable and acceptable principles). As such, it can be conceived that the more trustworthy leaders are perceived to be, the less urgency and motivation employees may feel to focus on recognizing sources of dissatisfaction and recommending modifications as they may believe that their leaders have excellent leadership skills and are doing a good job in maintaining an invaluable work environment. Thus, high levels of trust in leader may induce a tendency in employees to conform to the status quo and follow their leader without doubt.

Furthermore, findings of a recent study by Langfred (2004) suggest that the more that employees trust one another, the less they choose to monitor and correct each other. The clarification for this finding is that employees are concerned that monitoring others could be perceived as violation of trust itself, leading to anger, hurt, and fear on the part of the others who perceive a trust violation. In a similar vein, high trust in the leader might inhibit employees from engaging in high levels of voice behaviors as they may be concerned that pointing out critical work-related issues and voicing suggestions for improvements could be perceived by their leader as a lack of trust in his or her managerial competencies.

These reasons and empirical findings suggest that at least two possible considerations may underlie employees' reluctance to engage in voice behaviors when they perceive their leader as highly trustworthy. First, high trust in the leader may induce beliefs in employees that the reliability of their leader makes employee voice less necessary. Second, employees may refrain from voicing their concerns to avoid making the impression of violating their trust in the leader and causing disapproval and rejection in their relationship with their leader. Therefore, in addition to exploring the direct relationship between leader trust and employee voice, we also focus on investigating boundary conditions that can override such countervailing mechanisms and boost the facilitative effect of leader trust on employee voice. Specifically, we propose that empowering leadership may play an important role in determining when trust in leader does promote employee voice and when it does not. The choice of implicating empowering leadership as a moderator is logical because many organizations today increasingly use leadership practices that give power, autonomy and responsibility to employees in order to enable and encourage them to be more receptive and adaptive to their work environment (e.g., Ahearne et al., 2005; Kirkman & Rosen, 1997, 1999; Mathieu et al., 2006; Menon, 2001; Quinn & Spreitzer, 1997; Srivastava et al., 2006).

As leader trust in itself does not make clear for employees whether their leader expects them to engage in voice behavior, the positive and facilitative effect of leader trust may be unleashed when particular leader behaviors ensure employees that their leader seeks and supports employee voice. That is, when empowering leadership invites and stimulates employees to voice their comments and suggestions for addressing and solving work critical problems and issues, leader trust may facilitate employees to actually engage in voice behavior as they believe that their leader not only seeks their input but will also trustfully manage it. Thus, we propose that empowering leader behaviors may provide a voice-supportive context that unleashes the facilitative effect of leader trust on employee voice. To provide a rigorous test of this proposition, we build and test hypotheses for three different kinds of empowering leader behaviors that may operate as boundary conditions for the trust in leader–employee voice relationship. These three leader behaviors are participative decision making, informing, and coaching.

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1.2.1. Participative decision-making One substantial barrier to speaking up is an employee's lack of conviction that his or her input is explicitly needed and desired

by others (Edmondson, 2003). According to this kind of logic, if there is not a clear and compelling reason to offer one's views, the effort and risk involved in employee voice make it unlikely even for employees with higher leader trust. Participative decision making refers to leaders who deliberately seek and make use of employees' information and input in making decisions (e.g., Arnold et al., 2000; Locke, Alavi, & Wagner, 1997; Srivastava et al., 2006). Such leaders expect and encourage employees to express their ideas and opinions surrounding issues at stake and provide them with channels and opportunities for voice delivery. Hence, participative decision-making allows employees to form positive beliefs about how their leader seeks and values voice behaviors. As such, participative decision making is likely to form a strong voice-supportive context that will unleash the facilitative effect of leader trust in relation to employee voice. That is, the more employees perceive that their leaders expect them to participate in decision making by voicing their opinions and suggestions concerning issues at stake, the more likely it is that higher leader trust will increase employees' willingness to participate by actually engaging in voice behaviors. Moreover, leaders who empower and encourage employees to participate in decision making may neutralize employees' concerns about making the impression of violating their trust in the leader when they actually voice their concerns and opinions. In contrast, when leaders are perceived as not seeking employees' input in decision making, these concerns may linger and cause employees to remain silent, which should mitigate the positive relationship between trust in leader and employee voice. Accordingly, we hypothesize:

Hypothesis 2. Participative decision making moderates the relationship between trust in leader and employee voice such that this relationship is more positive when participative decision making is higher rather than lower.

1.2.2. Informing Another necessary factor related to employee voice is knowledge of the organizational goals, policies, and practices (Frese,

Teng, & Wijnen, 1999). Informing refers to a leader's dissemination of information that allows employees to create a good understanding of what their roles and responsibilities are in the organization's operations and how they can contribute to the goals of their work unit (Arnold et al., 2000; Bowen & Lawler, 1992; Spreitzer, 1996). Informing employees should enable them to feel responsible for the job and get involved in the affairs of the wider organization. Hence, it is likely that informing can enhance an employee's motivation to recognize problems or irregularities and develop suggestions for possible solutions and alternative work arrangements. In such an empowering context created by a leader's informing behavior, the facilitative effect of leader trust that promotes employees to engage in voice behaviors will be set free. In contrast, for employees who lack the empowering context of being informed by their leader, the facilitative effect of leader trust may not be unleashed, which should mitigate the positive relationship between leader trust and employee voice. Therefore, we expect the following:

Hypothesis 3. Informing moderates the relationship between trust in leader and employee voice such that this relationship is more positive when informing is higher rather than lower.

1.2.3. Coaching Coaching behaviors of leaders also create a strong empowering context that is likely to set free the facilitative effect of trust in

leader in relation to employee voice. Coaching implicates face-to-face communication and two-way influence processes in which leaders appreciate the input of employees and respond to their opinions actively and timely (Arnold et al., 2000). Previous research showed that the approachability and responsiveness of leaders play an important role in encouraging employee voice (Saunders, Sheppard, Knight, & Roth, 1992). Furthermore, as coaching behaviors of leaders facilitate and enable employees to accept more job responsibilities, the latter should feel stronger motivation to monitor and reflect on their own work, to express problems recognized, and to discuss ideas for solutions (Bennis & Nanus, 1985; Detert & Burris, 2007). For these reasons, empowering coaching behaviors of leaders are likely to enforce the facilitative effect of leader trust in promoting voice behaviors.

In addition, as coaching makes smooth interactions between employees and their leader available, it may reduce the threats often experienced by employees associated with raising uncomfortable topics. Likewise, with coaching behaviors, leaders can mitigate power imbalances through self-disclosure, noting their own fallibility and emphasizing the need for employees' opinions (Edmondson, 2003). Decreasing the power distance by coaching can substantially minimize employees' concerns of being humiliated or rejected for speaking up (Edmondson, 2003). For these reasons, coaching behaviors of leaders are likely to promote the positive effect of leader trust in relation to voice behavior.

Hypothesis 4. Coaching moderates the relationship between trust in leader and employee voice such that this relationship is more positive when coaching is higher rather than lower.

2. Method

2.1. Participants and procedures

Hypotheses were tested using data from a survey of front-line employees in a large telecommunication company in mainland China. Because of the increasing competitive pressure in the telecommunication industry, it is recognized that service quality is crucial for business development in which front-line employees can play an important role by speaking up about the problems

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they face in the conduct of their work. Top management of the company intended to develop policies and practices to encourage employees to speak up their concerns and suggestions in the workplace and provided us with the opportunity to conduct a survey study to identify factors that are related to employee voice. Employees from a broad variety of departments, such as sales department, client service department, marketing department, and planning department, participated in the survey. Questionnaires were administered to employees in a meeting room in their workplace. The survey took approximately 30 min to complete and employees were paid for their participation. To protect participant confidentiality, two research assistants distributed the questionnaires after a preparatory meeting and collected the questionnaires after completion

The focal sample for this study consisted of 400 employees from 40 workgroups in one company. Data from 314 employees were used in the study and 86 questionnaires were excluded from data analysis as they were incomplete. Thus, the response rate was 78.5%. The sample included 111 men (36.4%) and 203 women (63.6%) and the average age of the employees was 27.54 years (SD=10.33) and their average corporate tenure was 6.23 years (SD=8.27). The sample was fairly well educated with 16.5% having a university degree, 38.2% a junior college degree, 37.3% high school, and 7.9% having an education level lower than high school.

2.2. Measures

As all questionnaire items were originally developed in English, they were translated into Chinese by an academic who was bilingual in Chinese and English. Following Brislin's (1980) translation–back-translation procedure, we obtained a back- translation from another bilingual academic to ensure that the English and Chinese versions of the items were comparable at a high degree of accuracy.

2.2.1. Trust in leader Robinson and Rousseau's (1994) 7-item scale was used to measure trust in leader. Response scale ranged from “strongly

disagree” (1) to “strongly agree” (5). Responses were coded such that a high score indicates a high degree of trust in one's leader. Sample items are “I am not sure I fully trust my leader (reversed scored)” and “I believe my leader has high integrity”. We averaged the 7 items to create a measure of trust in leader. Cronbach's alpha for this scale is .87.

2.2.2. Participative decision making, informing, and coaching We measured these three empowering leader behaviors using the empowering leadership questionnaire (Arnold et al., 2000).

Employees indicated how frequently each statement about empowering leader behaviors fitted their leader (1=“almost never”, to 5=“almost always”). Participative decision making, informing and coaching were each measured by averaging 6 items. Cronbach's alphas for the respective scales were .89, .94, and .92. Sample items are “Encourages workgroup members to express ideas/suggestions” (participative decision-making), “Explains rules and expectations to my workgroup” (informing), and “Teaches workgroup members how to solve problems on their own” (coaching).

2.2.3. Employee voice A six-item employee voice questionnaire developed and validated by Van Dyne and LePine's (1998) was used. Employees

indicated how frequently each statement fitted their own behavior. Response scale ranged from “almost never” (1), to “almost always” (7). Sample items are “I develop and make recommendations concerning issues that affect this workgroup” and “I communicate my opinions about work issues to others in this group even if my opinion is different and others in the group disagree with me”. Cronbach's alpha for this scale is .84.

2.2.4. Control variables Following previous research (e.g., Detert & Burris, 2007), we included four demographic variables as control variables: sex

(0=female, 1=male), age (in years), organizational tenure (in years), and education (1=middle school, 2=high school/ secondary school, 3=associate degree, 4=bachelor, 5=master or doctor's degree).

3. Results

3.1. Confirmatory factor analysis

As all the data were collected from the same source, prior to testing hypotheses, we performed a confirmatory factor analysis to check the discriminant validity of the scales of trust in leader, participative decision making, informing, coaching, and employee voice. We formed one-factor, three-factor and five-factor models to test which model provides the best fit to the data (Anderson & Gerbing, 1988).

Results showed that the expected five-factor model fitted the data well, χ2=859.88, χ2/DF=2.03, CFI=.93, RMSEA=.06. Moreover, this five-factor model fitted the data much better than a single-factor model (χ2=2490.91, χ2/DF=5.74, Δχ2=1631.03, CFI=.69, RMSEA=.12) or an alternative three-factor model in which the items of the three empowering leader behaviors were set to load on a single construct (χ2=1657.88, χ2/DF=3.85, Δχ2=833.03, CFI=.81, RMSEA=.10). These results indicate that the scales of trust in leader, participative decision making, informing, coaching, and employee voice possessed adequate discriminant validity for use in our tests of the hypotheses.

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3.2. Descriptive statistics and correlations

Means, standard deviations, Cronbach's alpha coefficients and correlations among the study variables are presented in Table 1. Among the four demographic variables, only sex was significantly correlated with employee voice (r=.17, pb .01). This indicates that males were more likely to voice their opinions compared to females in this sample. Most of the correlations among the variables are in the expected direction. That is, trust in leader and the three empowering leader behaviors are all positively and significantly related to employee voice. Details are contained in Table 1.

3.3. Hypotheses testing

3.3.1. Hypothesis 1 To test the main effect of trust in leader on employee voice hypothesized, we conducted a regression analysis consisting of two

successivesteps.Theresultsofthis analysis areshowninTable2.Inthefirststep,thesocio-demographic variables wereentered tocontrol for relationships with leader trust and employee voice. In the second step, we included trust in leader to test its hypothesized main effect on employee voice. Since leader trust was significantly related to employee voice, the results provided support for Hypothesis 1.

3.3.2. Hypotheses 2–4 To test our hypotheses about the moderating effects of the empowering leader behaviors in the relationship between trust in

leader and employee voice, we used hierarchical moderated regression analyses. To avoid multicollinearity problems, variables were centered prior to the analysis (Cohen, Cohen, West, & Aiken, 2003; Van Dyne, Kamdar, & Joireman, 2008). Because participative decision-making, informing, and coaching were correlated with each other, we tested the moderating effects of each of these empowering leader behaviors after entering the other two into the regression analyses as control variables. As shown in Table 3, after controlling for the control variables in step 1, the main effects of leader trust and one of the empowering leader behaviors in step 2, in step 3 the interaction term of leader trust and the respective empowering leader behaviors of participative decision making, informing, and coaching provided significant results.

To enable further analyses of these interaction effects, we rearranged the total equations in simple main effects of leader trust on employee voice for high and low values of each of three empowering leader behaviors (M+1SD; M-1SD). As Fig. 1 illustrates, leader trust was positively associated with employee voice when the respective empowering leader behaviors were high

Table 1 Descriptive statistics and correlations for study variables.

Variables Mean S.D. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Gender 0.35 0.48 Age 27.54 10.33 .12 ⁎

Education 2.61 .091 .12 ⁎ .12 ⁎

Tenure 7.78 8.27 .08 .69 ⁎⁎ −.04 Trust in leader 3.65 0.81 .01 −.05 −.09 −.08 (.87) Participative decision-making 3.82 0.82 −.04 −.13 ⁎ −.12 ⁎ −.12 ⁎ .66 ⁎⁎ (.89) Coaching 3.76 0.91 .04 −.10 −.26 ⁎⁎ −.12 ⁎ .67 ⁎⁎ .72 ⁎⁎ (.92) Informing 3.82 0.91 .09 −.08 −.24 ⁎⁎ −.11 .55 ⁎⁎ .61 ⁎⁎ .77 ⁎⁎ (.94) Employee voice 5.18 0.93 .17 ⁎⁎ .05 .08 .03 .31 ⁎⁎ .29 ⁎⁎ .28 ⁎⁎ .23 ⁎⁎ (.84)

Note. N=314; Cronbach's alpha coefficients are on the diagonal in parentheses. ⁎ pb .05. ⁎⁎ pb .01.

Table 2 Regression results for Hypothesis 1.

Step and independent variables Dependent variable: employee voice

β Total R2 △R2 F

Step 1: Control variables Gender .15 ⁎⁎

Age .02 Education .08 Tenure .00

.03 .03 2.71 ⁎

Step 2: Main effect Trust in leader .32 ⁎⁎⁎

.13 .10 9.27 ⁎⁎⁎

Note. N=314. ⁎ pb .05.

⁎⁎ pb .01. ⁎⁎⁎ pb .001.

792 L. Gao et al. / The Leadership Quarterly 22 (2011) 787–798

(participative decision making: B=0.33, t=3.28, pb .01; informing: B=0.34, t=3.41, pb .001, coaching: B=0.32, t=3.21, pb .01), whereas this relationship was non-significant when the respective empowering leader behaviors were low (participative decision making: B=0.03, t=0.28, ns; informing: B=0.05, t=0.30, ns, coaching: B=0.03, t=0.27, ns). These results lend full support to Hypothesis 2, 3, and 4, respectively.

As some predictor variables were rather highly correlated, we assessed multicollinearity by examining the variance inflation factors (VIFs) when testing the hypotheses. The estimated VIFs were lower than 2.5, except for the coefficients of coaching which were lower than 3.7 and thus still substantially below the benchmark of 5 (Cooil, Keiningham, Aksoy, & Hsu, 2007).

3.4. Supplementary analyses

As the 314 participants were nested within 40 workgroups, the data may have some potential for bias due to the common influences that individuals share within the context of their workgroup, although the inter-rater agreement of the variables of

Table 3 Hierarchical regression results for Hypotheses 2–4.

Step and independent variables Dependent variable: employee voice

β Total R2 ΔR2 F

Hypothesis 2 Step 1: Control variables

Gender .12 ⁎

Age .01 Education .17 ⁎⁎

Tenure .06. Informing .04 Coaching .28 ⁎⁎⁎

.12 ⁎⁎⁎ .12 ⁎⁎⁎ 7.23 ⁎⁎⁎

Step 2 Trust in leader .16 ⁎

Participative decision-making (PDM) .13 .15 ⁎⁎⁎ .03 ⁎⁎ 6.85 ⁎⁎⁎

Step 3 Trust⁎PDM .15 ⁎⁎

.17 ⁎⁎⁎ .02 ⁎⁎ 7.09 ⁎⁎⁎

Hypothesis 3 Step 1: Control variables

Gender .14 ⁎⁎

Age .02 Education .15 ⁎

Tenure .05 Participative decision-making (PDM) .19 ⁎

Coaching .18 ⁎

.14 ⁎⁎⁎ .14 ⁎⁎⁎ 8.29 ⁎⁎⁎

Step 2 Trust in leader .16 ⁎

Informing .00 .15 ⁎⁎⁎ .01 6.85 ⁎⁎⁎

Step 3 Trust⁎informing .17 ⁎⁎

.18 ⁎⁎⁎ .03 ⁎⁎ 7.27 ⁎⁎⁎

Hypothesis 4 Step 1: Control variables

Gender .14 ⁎⁎

Age .03 Education .13 ⁎

Tenure .04 Participative decision-making (PDM) .25 ⁎⁎⁎

Informing .09 .13 ⁎⁎⁎ .13 ⁎⁎⁎ 7.69 ⁎⁎⁎

Step 2 Trust in leader .16 ⁎

Coaching .11 .15 ⁎⁎⁎ .02 ⁎ 6.85 ⁎⁎⁎

Step 3 Trust⁎coaching .15 ⁎⁎

.17 ⁎⁎⁎ .02 ⁎⁎ 6.96 ⁎⁎⁎

Note. N=314. ⁎ pb .05.

⁎⁎ pb .01. ⁎⁎⁎ pb .001.

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interest were relatively low (most of Rwgs are smaller than 0.6). To check for possible workgroup effects, we additionally conducted two-level analyses using linear mixed models in SPSS to decompose the total observed variance into individual-level and group-level residual variances. These multilevel analyses provided the same pattern of results as reported above. Controlling for workgroup effects, leader trust was again found to be significantly and positively associated with employee voice (B=0.35, t=5.76, pb .001), and this association was moderated by each of the three empowering leadership behaviors (participative decision making: B=0.15, t=2.32, pb .05; informing: B=0.16, t=2.47, pb.05; and coaching: B=0.13, t=2.09, pb.05).

Furthermore, because of the single-source data collection procedure, we have conducted some additional tests to check for the presence of common method effect. The confirmatory factor analyses reported above revealed that a single-factor model mapping all items on a single latent variable possessed a very poor fit to the data, whereas the five-factor model provided the best fit. Thus, the data passed Harman's single-factor test (Harman, 1967), which provides some evidence against serious common method variance in construct measurement. However, this technique is more useful in determining the extent to which common method variance (CMV) is present rather than controlling for it (Friedrich, Byrne, & Mumford, 2009). Therefore, we additionally used the single-common-method-factor approach (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003) to statistically control for common method bias when testing the hypothesized relationships between leader trust, empowering leadership, and employee voice. That is, using structural equation modeling, we included a single latent method factor in our theoretical models to be tested. The results indicated that, when controlled for the latent CMV factor, the direct relationship between leader trust and employee voice vanished (Estimate=−0.34, CR=−0.05, ns), whereas the interactive effects of leader trust and the empowering leadership behaviors of participative decision making (Estimate=0.21, CR=3.35, pb .001), informing (Estimate=0.20, CR=3.22, pb .001), and coaching (Estimate=0.17, CR=2.63, pb .01) remain all significant.

Finally, we conducted additional regression analyses to examine alternative models assuming interactive effects of employee voice and empowering leadership behavior on trust in leader. After ruling out the latent CMV factor, we found that only the interaction effect of employee voice and participative decision making reached a significant level (Estimate=0.25, CR=3.70, pb .001), whereas the interaction effects of employee voice with informing (Estimate=0.00, CR=0.12, ns) and coaching (Estimate=0.01, CR=0.78, ns) were not significant. These results suggest that our research model in which empowering leadership moderates the relationship between trust in leader and employee voice provides a better fit to the data than an alternative model assuming that empowering leadership is a boundary condition of a reversed voice–trust relationship.

4. Discussion

Employees voicing comments and recommendations for change may challenge the status quo and elements of the established systems of beliefs and routines. Hence, employees who speak out run the risk of being opposed by their leaders who usually feel a sense of ownership towards the current framework of thoughts and practices. Another risk is that leaders take unfair advantage of employee voice when they utilize employees' input for making improvements without providing the voicing employees with appropriate recognition and rewards. A central tenet of the trust literature assumes that interpersonal trust allows people to accept vulnerability to others and thus promotes risk-taking behaviors (e.g., Colquitt et al., 2007; Mayer et al., 1995; Rousseau et al., 1998). Accordingly, the results of the present study indicate that trust in leader is positively related to employee voice. This finding suggests that trust in their leader allows employees to become vulnerable towards the leader, which in turn increases the

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Fig. 1. Interactions between trust in leader and three empowering leader behaviors in predicting employee voice.

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likelihood that they actually engage in voicing their opinions and suggestions. In contrast, having low levels of leader trust inhibits the likelihood that they will take the risk of voicing their concerns and recommendations about work matters. However, when these results were controlled for common method variance, the direct relationship between leader trust and employee voice did not remain statistically significant, indicating that the main effect of leader trust should be considered within boundary conditions.

As such, we found empowering leadership behaviors to operate as a boundary condition that moderates the relationship between leader trust and employee voice. More specifically, the positive relationships between trust in leader and employee voice does only emerge when employees perceive that their leaders invite and encourage them to speak out. When leaders do not exhibit empowering leader behaviors, leader trust is unrelated to employee voice. We found this moderating influence for three alternative empowering leader behaviors, namely participative decision making, informing, and coaching. Thus, these findings suggest that leader trust in itself is not always sufficient to produce a positive effect on employee voice, and that it requires an empowering leadership context in which leaders encourage and invite employees to voice their concerns and recommendations regarding work affairs.

4.1. Theoretical implications

Based on the assumption of trust leading to risk-taking behaviors, researches to date have mainly focused on investigating the direct effects of trust on various work behaviors. However, the relationship between trust and risk-taking behavior seems to be complex and may not be uniform across different conditions, indicating that theoretical frameworks including boundary conditions for trust effects are needed. In the present study, we extend previous research by providing empirical support for our assertion that the effect of trust in leader on employee voice depends on an empowering leadership context in which employees feel encouraged and stimulated by their leaders to engage themselves in voice behavior. That is, our results showed that empowering leadership behavior was critical for leader trust to produce the expected positive effects on employee voice. The finding that trust in the leader did not produce higher levels of employee voice when empowering leadership behavior was absent accentuates the importance of an empowering leadership context as a boundary condition.

Furthermore, the present results meet Langfred's (2004) call to balance the study of the benefits of interpersonal trust by identifying conditions under which trust may not have the positive effects normally associated with it. That is, trust in leader was found not to promote employee voice when employees perceived their leader to display low rather than high levels of empowering leadership behaviors. This finding suggests that leader trust in itself does not make clear for employees whether their leader expects them to engage in voice behavior. As elaborated, high leader trust may induce beliefs in employees that the reliability of their leader make voice less necessary, or they may even believe that voice may make the impression of violating their trust in the leader. Consistent with these notions, prior research has shown that members of teams high in characteristics like cohesiveness and trust tend to be reluctant to monitor and correct one another's actions (e.g., Baron, Vandello, & Brunsman, 1996; Langfred, 2004). Our study results suggest that leaders can ensure and unleash the potentially facilitative effects of leader trust for employee voice by displaying empowering leadership behaviors that unequivocally invite and encourage employees to provide their input and speak out their comments and suggestions.

Since we found a context of empowering leadership to be an important boundary condition for the relationship between trust in leader and employee voice, future research might focus on exploring and identifying additional factors in the micro and macro context that shape the effects of interpersonal trust. Micro climates reflect collective perceptions of employees within workgroups. As such, leadership behaviors are not only relevant for employees' individual perceptions but may also develop a collective empowerment climate (e.g., Chen, Kirkman, Kanfer, Allen, & Rosen, 2007; Seibert, Silver, & Randolph, 2004) in a work unit that may influence the ways in which interpersonal trust exerts its influence on employee voice. Studies focusing on the role of macro climates in employee voice may implicate factors such as leadership behaviors of top managers, formal communication channels in the organization, and organizational culture orientation. Examining the influence of both micro and macro context factors can importantly advance the understanding of group and organizational conditions under which trust does promote employee voice, and when it does not.

In addition, this study contributes to theory and research on empowering leadership as it identifies the leader behaviors of participative decision making, informing, and coaching as moderators in the relationship between leader trust and employee voice. Prior research has primarily related empowering leadership to a variety of mediating and outcome variables (e.g., Ahearne et al., 2005; Srivastava et al., 2006), but the possibility that empowering leader behaviors may function as boundary conditions for the effects of employee–leader relational constructs has not previously been examined. As such, the present study suggests that the benefits of empowering leader behaviors are that they encourage and enable employees who highly trust their leader to actually engage in voice behaviors and provide their thoughts and ideas about critical work problems and issues. Besides shaping such trust effects, future research can examine the extent to which empowering leadership may determine the effects of adjacent interpersonal concepts such as interactional fairness and leader–member exchange.

4.2. Practical implications

Our results showed that leader trust can substantially promote employee voice. Therefore, the important issue for practitioners is how to build trust between leaders and employees. Previous studies showed that employee trust in leaders can be fostered by procedural justice (Korsgaard, Schweiger, & Sapienza, 1995; Yang, Mossholder, & Peng, 2009), high-quality leader–member exchanges (LMX; Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995), transformational leadership (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Moorman, & Fetter, 1990),

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cooperative goals (Tjosvold, 1998), rewards (Ferrin & Dirks, 2003), and interpersonal emotion management (Williams, 2007). Yet our findings suggest that capitalizing on enhancing leader trust to promote employee voice will only pay off when leaders display empowering leader behaviors that encourage and enable employees to engage in voice behaviors. Thus, in order to secure high levels of employee voice, organizations should not only promote employees' trust in their leaders—through procedural justice, LMX, cooperative goals—but also focus on leader selection and development to ensure that empowering leadership behaviors are performed (Srivastava et al., 2006). For example, the assessment of empowering leader behaviors can be incorporated into the subordinate portion of 360° feedback instruments. This would assist organizations to monitor and support leaders in their attempts to provide a voice-supportive context to employee voice.

In complex, dynamic, and competitive work environments, organizations need employees' input of comments and suggestions for addressing and solving work critical problems and issues (e.g., Detert & Burris, 2007; Morrison & Milliken, 2000; Ryan & Oestreich, 1998). Hence, it has become important for managers to understand the antecedents and conditions that facilitate employees to engage in voice behaviors and express their concerns and opinions on the state of affairs in the workplace (Van Dyne, Ang, & Botero, 2003). As such, the present results about the interactive effect of leader trust and empowering leadership behaviors on employee voice can help managers design interventions and shape empowering leadership behaviors that may aid employees to highlight work-related issues and express their comments and suggestions for responding to them.

4.3. Potential limitations and conclusion

Although the hypotheses were based on theory and our results supported the theoretical predictions, there are several limitations to this research that should be noted. Following a recent study on employee voice by Detert and Burris (2007), we used self-ratings of participants to assess employee voice. Given the self-report measures used for both the predictor and criterion variables, the findings do not eliminate the threat of common method variance in the effects of leader trust and empowering leadership on employee voice. However, common method variance tends to reduce the likelihood of detecting interaction effects (cf. Wall, Jackson, Mullarkey, & Parker, 1996). Therefore, the observed two-way interaction between leader trust and empowering leader behavior in the current study can be considered as meaningful support for the central proposition in this paper. Moreover, confirmatory factor analyses revealed that a five-factor model differentiating between leader trust, participative-decision making, informing, coaching, and employee voice possessed a much better fit to the data than a single-factor model mapping all items on a single latent variable. If our data was seriously biased due to common method variance, it is likely that the single-factor model would not have shown such a misfit to the data. In addition, we used a single-common-method-factor approach (Podsakoff et al., 2003) to statistically control for common method bias. The results of this statistical procedure indicated that the interactive effects of leader trust and the empowering leader behaviors remained all significant, while the direct relationship between leader trust and employee voice disappeared. Thus, these additional results suggest that the direct relationship between leader trust and employee voice found in the present study might be attributable to common method bias to some extent. However, our main proposition that leader trust by itself may not be sufficient to promote employee voice and needs empowering leadership behaviors to unleash its facilitative effects seems to be confirmed even when a rigorous test for ruling out the potential for common method bias has been conducted.

An advantage of the self-ratings of employee voice is that an employee's cognitive representation and report of his or her own voice behavior may be more subtle than those of observers such as leaders or peers, since an employee has much more information about the historical, contextual, intentional and other backgrounds of his or her own behavior (cf. Jones & Nisbett, 1971). Moreover, observer measures may miss many genuine employee voice behaviors, and may capture only those gestures intended to impress others. However, while self-reports of employee voice might be more subtle than leader- or peer-reports, the latter measures provide an assessment of employee voice that is procedurally independent of the participants' reports of leader trust and empowering leadership. Therefore, future research might include both self- and observer-reports of employee voice.

Another limitation is that the cross-sectional design did not allow us to determine the direction of causality among the variables. The results might be vulnerable to opposite or bi-directional relationships due to the possibility that voicing concerns and suggestions might influence trust processes between employees and their leaders. However, a strong argument against this possibility of reversed causality is that theory and previous research have persuasively presented interpersonal trust and leadership behaviors as causes of a broad variety of work behaviors among which is employee voice (e.g., Colquitt et al., 2007; Detert & Burris, 2007; Dirks & Ferrin, 2001; Mayer et al., 1995; Morrison & Milliken, 2000; Premeaux & Bedeian, 2003; Rousseau et al., 1998).

We argued that high trust in the leader by itself may not always be sufficient to promote employee voice because of two possible countervailing mechanisms. That is, high trust in the leader may induce beliefs in employees that the competence and reliability of their leader make employee voice less necessary. Moreover, employees may refrain from voicing their concerns to avoid making the impression of violating their trust in the leader. However, we did not measure these mechanisms to examine the propositions empirically. Thus, future research may attempt to obtain data on these countervailing mechanisms and empirically test their roles in the effects of trust perceptions on employee voice.

Furthermore, we examined the joint impact of leader trust and empowering leadership on employee voice in only one type of organization. It is possible that work environment and organization type shape the magnitude of the effects of trust in leader on employee voice, and the extent to which these effects are moderated by empowering leadership behaviors. For example, the joint effects of leader trust and empowering leadership might be more pronounced in work and organizational settings characterized by complex tasks and rapidly changing environments, as was partly the case in the company in this piece of research. Likewise, as the

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present findings are based on the responses of participants who worked in a single geographic area, one may argue that our results are culturally specific and thus cannot be generalized to other contexts. Considering that China is a country with a collectivistic and power–distance culture (Hofstede, 1994), its culture might have pronounced the effects of leader trust and empowering leadership behaviors on employee voice, whereas these effects might be mitigated by more individualistic and expressive cultures such as those in North America and Europe. The generalization of our results to employees performing their duties in different types of work environments and different cultural contexts awaits further empirical examination.

These limitations notwithstanding, our research findings provide valuable insights into how trust in leader interacts with empowering leader behaviors in influencing employee voice. That is, we found leader trust to be positively related to employee voice when employees perceived their leaders as encouraging and enabling them to engage in expressing their comments and suggestions for addressing and solving critical work problems and issues. When employees did not feel empowered by their leaders, leader trust did not promote employee voice. Thus, these findings suggest that even in the case of high leader trust, empowering leadership behaviors are needed to ensure employees that their input is desired.

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