Predicting employee voice behavior: an exploration of the roles of empowering leadership, power distance, organizational learning capability, and sense of empowerment in Korean organizations.

Abstract

Organizations increasingly need people who openly express their new ideas and make valuable suggestions for change in order to proactively respond to the challenges of a dynamic business environment. Accordingly, an important question to answer in developing a better understanding of employee voice is what motivates and influences employees to speak up. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the antecedents and processes influencing employee voice behavior. Specifically, this study sought to investigate whether organizational learning capability and power distance orientation moderate the relationship between empowering leadership and employee voice behavior, and further examined the effects of empowering leadership and organizational learning capability on voice behavior, as mediated by psychological empowerment. A correlational design was used to collect and analyze survey data. Data were collected from a cross-sectional sample of 403 Korean employees of for-profit organizations in South Korea. Hypotheses were tested by utilizing multiple moderated regression analyses and structural equation modeling. A series of confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to test the construct validity of the measurements. The findings of this study indicated that empowering leadership and organizational learning capability positively predicted voice behavior, and power distance orientation negatively predicted voice behavior. Also, both power distance orientation and organizational learning capability moderated the relationship between empowering leadership and voice behavior. Furthermore, psychological empowerment partially mediated the influence of empowering leadership on voice behavior, whereas it fully mediated the influence of organizational learning capability on voice behavior. This study sought to contribute to the body of knowledge on empowering leadership, power distance, organizational learning, and employee voice behavior by uniquely integrating four developed streams of research that have not been connected previously. The findings of this study can provide the conceptual basis for interventions that are designed to promote voice behavior in organizations. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, along with limitations of the study and directions for future research.