Abstract: In the era of economic globalization, it is generally difficult to respond to complicated changing external environment merely dependent upon business managers’ wisdom. Thus, there is an urgent need for employees to actively bring forth reasonable opinions, ideas and suggestions. Employee voice has been proven to be helpful for improving work procedures, correcting operational deviations and improving decision-making. Although it is so important for the survival and development of organizations, employee voice is the last usual behavior in organizations. Very few employees dare to speak to their leaders about the existing problems in the organization frankly. Therefore, how to stimulate employee voice is a key and difficult issue for present managers and researchers.
Firstly, it may be easily inferred from systematic review of related literature that leadership behaviors play crucial roles in predicting employee voice. Domestic and foreign scholars have successively demonstrated that abusive supervision, leader forgiveness, ethical leadership, participative leadership, authentic leadership and humble leadership are significantly correlated with employee voice but ignored the influence of self-sacrificial leadership on it. In view of this, this paper firstly intends to discuss the impact of self-sacrificial leadership on employee voice. Besides, self-sacrificial leaders are concerned about their employees’ needs and sacrifice themselves for the benefits of organizations, which are favorable for improving employees’ esteem, sense of belonging and psychological safety. According to the social identity theory, esteem, sense of belonging and psychological safety plays critical roles in facilitating identification with the leader. Identification with the leader refers to employees’ consistent perception of cognition, attitudes and behaviors and so forth with leaders. Employees who identify their leaders to a greater extent are more inclined to internalize leaders’ objectives, beliefs and values into their own behaviors, so they are quite likely to voice at risks for the benefits of organizations. Self-sacrificial leadership might indirectly affect employee voice via the identification with leader. Hence, this paper also intends to discuss the mediating effects of identification with leader in the relationship between self-sacrificial leadership and employee voice. At last, does self-sacrificial leadership necessarily contribute to the generation of employees’ identification with the leader? Pursuant to the social identity theory, employees’ explanation toward the motivation of leadership behaviors is critical for the formation of identification with the leader. Employees having strong perceptions of leader hypocrisy tend to believe that all the sacrifice of leaders is for private benefits, so their identification with the leader may be weakened when they face self-sacrificial leaders. However, employees having weaker perceptions of leader hypocrisy consider that the sacrifice of leaders is for collective interests, so their identification with the leader may be improved by self-sacrificial leadership. Hence, this paper aims to discuss how perceptions of leader hypocrisy moderates the relationship between self-sacrificial leadership and identification with the leader.
In the research, this paper chooses employees and their leader as respondents from 12 enterprises of Guizhou province in China, who engage in different industries such as finance, manufacturing, food and retail. Employees filled out questionnaires including items of self-sacrificial leadership, identification with leaders, perceptions of leader hypocrisy and demographic factors, while leaders finished questionnaires incorporating items of employee voice.Finally, 295 valid questionnaires were obtained after eliminating 35 invalid one. We analyzed the 295 sets of paired data through structural equation modelling and hierarchical multiple regression. The results indicated that self-sacrificial leadership had a significantly positive effect on employee voice; identification with the leader played a mediating role in the relationship between self-sacrificial leadership and employee voice; perceptions of leader hypocrisy moderated the relationship between self-sacrificial leadership and identification with the leader, and it also moderated the mediating effect of identification with the leader in the relationship between self-sacrificial leadership and employee voice.
There are three theoretical contributions as follows: Firstly, this paper confirms the positive connections between self-sacrificial leadership and employee voice. By systematically sorting out existing literature, we found that leadership styles including abusive supervision, leader forgiveness, ethical leadership, participative leadership, authentic leadership and humble leadership are important factors influencing employee voice, while the impact of self-sacrificial leadership on employee voice is obviously neglected. This paper appropriately reveals the relationship between self-sacrificial leadership and employee voice, which further enrich studies on antecedents of employee voice. Furthermore, this paper finds that identification with the leader mediates the relationship between self-sacrificial leadership and employee voice based on the social identity theory, which effectively reveals the way through which self-sacrificial leadership impacts employee voice. Despite some scholars have discovered that organizational identification is a bridge between self-sacrificial leadership and employee behaviors, very little research has been conducted on the mediating effects of identification with the leader which directly and effectively influences employees’ cognition, attitudes and behaviors. Therefore, this paper examines and demonstrates the intrinsic way that self-sacrificial leadership influence employee voice through the identification with leader from the perspective of the social identity theory, further diversifying studies on the mediating mechanism for the relationship between self-sacrificial leadership and employee voice. At last, this paper selects perceptions of leader hypocrisy as the moderator and defines the boundary condition of self-sacrificial leadership on identification with the leader. This research reveals that perceptions of leader hypocrisy significantly weaken the influence of self-sacrificial leadership on identification with the leader. In front of self-sacrificial leaders, employees having weaker perceptions of leader hypocrisy are more prone to generate identification with their leaders. Existing studies mainly focus on the moderating effects of employees’ personalities (traditionalism and collectivism) and leaders’ characteristics (leader ability and leader prototypicality) in the impact of self-sacrificial leadership on its relevant outcome. This paper considers perceptions of leader hypocrisy as moderator and expands existing studies on the boundary conditions of employee voice. 
In general, this paper reached some valuable conclusions but remained somelimitations to be improved as follows. (1) This paper is a cross-sectional study, which is ineffective for judging causal relationship between variables. In future studies, we might consider collecting data at different time points. (2) This paper only investigates the moderating effects of perceptions of leader hypocrisy in the relationship between self-sacrificial leadership and identification with leader. In the future studies, we might take cultural variables like long-term orientations into account.

Key words: self-sacrificial leadership, identification with leader, perceptions of leader hypocrisy, employee’s voice