Abstract:

Given the significance of employee voice to organizations and the contradictory psychology when employees make voice decisions, many organizations and scholars have paid more and more attention to how to boosting employee voice. Previous research has examined many factors that influence employee voice, including different styles of leadership. Transactional and transformational leadership, as the most typical two leadership styles, are therefore of interest to many voice scholars. The direct effect of transformational leadership on employee voice has been tested, and many key mediators and moderators have been explored. However, there are still some deficiencies in the current research. Firstly, most attention has been paid to the relationship between transformational leadership and employee voice, yet little is known about the relationship between transactional leadership and employee voice. Transactional leadership is an important style of leadership, which is widely existed in the management practice, it is necessary to find out the relationship between transactional leadership and employee voice. Secondly, previous research has found some boundary conditions of the relationship between transformational leadership and employee voice, which can be classified into two types: employee characteristics and leader factors. However, voice scholars′ attention has always been focused on the separate moderating effects of employee characteristics or leadership factors. Little research puts employee and leader together and takes their interaction into account. The interaction of employee and leader may be an important situation in which employee voice take places. Employees under the same transactional/transformational leadership may make completely opposite voice decisions when they have different interactions with their leaders. Trust is a key determinant of personal interaction, which has profound effect on interpersonal communication and cooperation. Trust is mutual. In organizational management, there are upward trust (trust from employee to leader, employee trust) and downward trust (trust from leader to employee, felt trust). Drawing on social exchange theory, trust between superiors and subordinates has an important effect on employee behavior. Some evidence shows that mutual leader-subordinate trust can predict employee attitude and behavior better than one-way trust. Therefore, this study proposes that it is necessary to take mutual leader-subordinate trust into research frame as situational factors when testing the relationship between transactional / transformational leadership and employee voice.Rooted in social exchange theory, this study aims at examining the effects of transactional and transformational leadership on employee voice, and exploring the change of those effects under different situations of mutual leader-subordinate trust. The sample for this study consists of 366 pairs of employees and their direct supervisors and they are from 6 manufacturing enterprises located in the three northeast provinces of China. Leaders are asked to evaluate employees′ voice behavior, and employees are asked to report leadership styles, trust and felt trust. This study uses multiple regression analyses for empirical test and the results of study show that: (1) both transactional and transformational leadership have positive effects on employee voice, and the effect of transformational leadership is stronger than transactional leadership. (2)Employee trust positively moderates the transactional leadership-employee voice and transformational leadership-employee voice relationships. When employee trust is higher, the relationships between transactional/transformational and employee voice is noticeably stronger. (3) the interaction of employee trust and felt trust positively moderates the transactional leadership-employee voice and transformational leadership-employee voice relationships. The relationships are the strongest when both employee trust and felt trust are high and weakest when both employee trust and felt trust are low; compared with high trust and low felt trust, when felt trust is higher than trust, the relationships between transactional/transformational leadership and employee voice are stronger. The current study makes some contributions both theoretically and practically. Theoretically, (1) the effect of transactional leadership on employee voice has been ignored, the current study offers empirical evidence. (2) the current study enriches and expands the boundary conditions research of transactional/transformational leadership effectiveness. (3) although both scholars and practical managers acknowledge that mutual trust is the important premise of stable and sustainable cooperation, there are little direct evidence for this positive effect. From the perspective of employees, the current study, taking employee as both trustor and trustee, explores the effect of the interaction of trust and felt trust, which expands trust theory to some extent. (4) compared with relatively mature employee trust theory, felt trust theory is still in its infancy stage. Related research is limited, especially in China. The current study explores the role of felt trust in leadership process, and finds that felt trust has stronger impact on employee, which can inspire more future research. Practically, the results of this study suggest that to boost employee voice, leaders should show more distinct transformational leadership style, and more efforts should be devoted to establish mutual trust, especially convey trust to employees.

Key words: transactional leadership, transformational leadership, voice, mutual trust, trust, felt trust