The multilevel influence of team virtuality on employee silence:&nbsp;The role of workplace loneliness and psychological resilience

WANG Chang-Feng; LIU Liu

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Science Research Management ›› 2023, Vol. 44 ›› Issue (3) : 179-186.

The multilevel influence of team virtuality on employee silence: The role of workplace loneliness and psychological resilience

Wang Changfeng, Liu Liu

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Abstract

With the flattening trend of organizational structure and the popularization of network information technology, especially in the uncertain environment caused by the COVID-19 epidemic, many teams have begun to adjust their organizational structure and management mode to virtualization. Team virtuality describes the virtualization level of a team. While meeting the need for organizational flexibility, team virtuality can also lead to management challenges: In virtual organizational situations, many employees hide behind the screens. Even though they know the problems and solutions in some aspects of the organization′s operation and management process, the employees choose to keep silent. Employee silence will hinder organizational change and development, contrary to the original intention of virtualization adjustment. To reduce employee silence, organizations must understand the formation mechanism of employee silence. Previous studies have confirmed that employees will look for clues to guide their behavior in work situations. As a representation of the work situation, whether team virtuality has an impact on employee silence and how it works, our study aims to discuss these questions.The Affective Events Theory points out that the work situation characteristics can stimulate individual emotional reactions, and the emotional responses will affect individual work behavior. Workplace loneliness reflects the emotion of employees facing teams with different virtual degrees, and it can explain the mechanism of team virtuality on employee silence. In addition, the Affective Events Theory further emphasizes that individual traits play an essential role in the boundary of individual emotional responses. Psychological resilience is a particular trait that can drive employees to recognize and adjust to the work situation. It may be a boundary condition that explains the influence of team virtuality on employee silence through workplace loneliness.Although the existing research on employee silence are relatively rich, most of them explored the internal mechanism of employee silence from the relational and cognitive path, ignoring the influence of emotional factors on work results, resulting in one-sidedness conclusions, which is not conducive to guiding organizational management practice. Drawing on the Affective Events Theory, this paper collects a lot of primary data from 317 team members from 63 research and development teams, and analyzes the multilevel influence of team virtuality on employee silence. The results are as follows: team virtuality has a positive impact on employee silence; workplace loneliness mediates the relationship between team virtuality and employee silence; psychological resilience negatively moderated the relationship between team virtuality and workplace loneliness, also negatively moderated the whole mediating mechanism. The theoretical contribution of this study is reflected in the following three aspects: First, this study explores the influence of team virtuality on members′ interaction in any form of the team, breaking through the limitation of previous studies only focusing on virtual teams. The conclusion provides a new analytical perspective and theoretical framework for explaining employees′ behavioral tendencies. Besides, previous studies mostly explored the formation mechanism of employee silence from a single level. This study used a multilevel analysis method to explore the internal mechanism of team virtuality on employee silence. Second, this study chooses the emotional path, which is rarely used in previous studies, to explain the generation mechanism of employee silence in virtual organization situations. Third, this study comprehensively investigates the interaction effect of team virtuality and psychological resilience, and delineates more precise conditions for the main results.In a business environment characterized by flexible working arrangements and rapid technological development, virtuality is increasingly becoming an essential attribute of teams rather than an exception. The problem for organizations is not to reduce virtuality, but to make better use of it. Based on this, the management implications of this study are as follows: First, managers should be fully aware of the negative impact of team virtuality on employees′ work behaviors, create conditions to maintain the timeliness and synchronicity of communication among members, so that the team can keep the appropriate virtuality. At the same time, the organization should design training programs for virtual work situations. Second, managers should take intervention measures in daily work to minimize employees′ workplace loneliness, such as giving employees value recognition and social care, and lead emotional interaction among members. Third, managers should fully consider the psychological resilience of employees, and hire candidates who can actively adapt to the virtual nature of the team.

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team virtuality / employee silence / workplace loneliness / psychological resilience

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Wang Changfeng, Liu Liu. The multilevel influence of team virtuality on employee silence: The role of workplace loneliness and psychological resilience[J]. Science Research Management. 2023, 44(3): 179-186

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