Raise Their Voices: The Link Between Motivating Language and Employee Voice

Abstract

Employee voice – in our study, upward and constructive work-related messages – is instrumental to many desirable employee and organizational outcomes including performance, organizational learning, and psychological well-being. Considerable research demonstrates that leader behavior, notably from the immediate supervisor, is significantly related to an employee’s decision to exercise voice. Recent research advances how such influence is specifically transmitted through leader communication. We take a closer look at these phenomena by investigating if strategic immediate supervisory oral communication, embodied in motivating language and the mediators of leader transparency, openness to feedback, and follower-perceived purpose, has significant relationships with both promotive and prohibitive employee voice. The majority of our hypotheses are supported based on a large, cross-national, and diverse sample of 597 respondents. These findings and their implications for research and practice are more fully discussed in the paper.