Ethical Leadership and Voice Behavior
In ethical leadership literature, past empirical evidence has demonstrated that ethical leadership predict employee voice behavior (Brown, et al., 2005; Walumbwa & Schaubroeck, 2009). For instance, a recent study Brown et al. (2005) noted that when employees feel that ethical leaders provide fairly, and high moral standards environment (Brown, et al., 2005), they learn and internalize mode of leader and behave concordantly with them, thereby to promote speaking up and offering suggestions toward the leaders.
Beyond this assumption, Brown and his colleagues (2005) pointed out that ethical leadership was positively influence on employee’s willingness to report problems to management. Similarly, De Hoogh and Den Hartog (2008) suggested that ethical leaders encourage employees to express opinions and listen to their concerns, in turn facilitating employee voice behavior. In support of this notion, Walumbwa and Schaubroeck (2009) used empirical study investigating ethical leadership and employee’s voice behavior, adopted dyad data (894 employees and their 222 supervisors) in a large financial institution. The empirical findings support the notion that ethical leadership behaviors enhance the emergence of employee voice behavior. Although the aforementioned explanations of the positive association between ethical leadership and voice have been existed by previous studies, it is not clear whether ethical leaders promote employee voice behavior through work engagement. Thus, it is worthwhile to further examine the proposed mechanisms in link ethical leadership and voice behavior in the following sections.
Ethical Leadership and Work Engagement
Work engagement view as a unique motivation, and conceptualized as the harnessing of organizational members’ selves to their work roles in term of physical, cognitive and emotional energy to their work role (Kahn, 1990; May, Gilson, & Harter, 2004; Rich, et al., 2010). According to leadership theory literatures have indicated that leader behaviors can influence followers’ motivation (Bass, 1985;
Harris, Wheeler, & Kacmar, 2009; Piccolo, et al., 2010; Tierney, Farmer, & Graen, 1999), for example, Promotion
Focus Ethical
Leadership
Work Engagement
Voice Behavior
Bono and Judge (2003) as well as Zhe, Avolio and Walumbwa (2009) discovered that transformational leadership was positively associated with work engagement. Babcock-Roberson and Strickland (2010) suggested that charismatic leadership was positively related to employee’s work engagement. Thus, we rely on these research bases to extend and examine the motivational of effect of leaders.
Leader is typically seen as an important role in process of social influence in one organization (Babcock-Roberson & Strickland, 2010; Tsai, Chen, & Cheng, 2009). Based on the social information processing perspective (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978), which indicated that individuals collect situational cues from their work environment thereby affect their motivation, to help explain the underlying influence process via which ethical leadership would be expected to influence employee work engagement. For example, ethical leaders are likely to use delegation to motivate and consider developmental needs of employee (Mahsud, et al., 2010; Zhu, et al., 2009; Zhu, et al., 2004), and increase employees’ perception about importance of their job. Such leaders behaviors increasing employee’s sense of control, broadening individuals’ responsibilities, and sense of psychological meaningfulness, and then enhancing greater motivation and effort (Piccolo, et al., 2010; Zhu, et al., 2009). By more absorbed and dedicated, and devoting more amounts of physical, cognitive and emotional energy to their work role, and consequently higher work engagement (May, et al., 2004; Rich, et al., 2010; Saks, 2006).
Similar to transformational leaders, researchers indicated ethical dimension of leadership has been embedded primarily within the transformational leadership domain (Bass & Avolio, 2000 ; Brown &
Treviño, 2006; Brown, et al., 2005). For example, transformational leaders (one important aspect of ethical leadership) also consider employee needs for growth and development to make sure their needs are match (Avolio, 1999; Zhu, et al., 2009). Employees working with such leaders will facilitate levels of employee personnel presence and identification with their work in trigger their psychological meaningfulness and work engagement (Zhu, et al., 2009). In Zhu et al. (2009)’s research, providing further empirical study for this linkage, they examined in various industries in South Africa in exploring the relationship between transformational leadership and work engagement. The results showed that transformational leadership has positively associated with employee work engagement.
Other studies have used social learning perspective to account for how leaders affect employees’ work engagement. Like ethical leaders, charismatic leaders (one important aspect of ethical leadership) convey employees with a role model and making personnel sacrifices (Babcock-Roberson & Strickland, 2010;
Brown, et al., 2005; May, Chan, Hodges, & Avolio, 2003; Yorges, Weiss, & Strickland, 1999). When charismatic leaders dedication to their work, from social learning perspective (Bandura, 1977), employee also learn and emulate behaviors of attractive role model, thereby evoke the work motivation and energy in their work. In an empirical study, finding from Babcock-Roberson & Strickland (2010) reports that charismatic leadership is generally helpful in fostering employee work engagement. Following this line of reasoning and previous research findings support for the proposed ethical leadership and work engagement association, we thus propose the proposition:
Proposition 1: Ethical leadership will be positive related to work engagement.
Work Engagement and Voice Behavior
As work engagement researcher suggested, work engagement is significantly predictor in employee work
outcomes (Babcock-Roberson & Strickland, 2010; Blader & Tyler, 2009; Hakanen, Bakker, & Schaufeli, 2006; Rich, et al., 2010; Saks, 2006), particularly proactive behavior (Salanova & Schaufeli, 2008;
Sonnentag, 2003). Proactive behavior defined as “taking initiative in improving current circumstances and involves challenging the status quo” (Crant, 2000, p.436). Voice behavior is a pattern of proactive behaviors, in which focus on discretionary speaking up to improve on work-related problems in workgroups (Grant &
Ashford, 2008; LePine & Van Dyne, 1998). According to work engagement model (Rich, et al., 2010; Saks, 2006), engage individuals work with greater intensity and exhibit high levels of intrinsic motivation for their tasks (Bakker & Xanthopoulou, 2009; Rich, et al., 2010). When employees with more vigor, dedication and absorption energy into their work roles, they will more tend to engage in behavior that are altruistic and virtuous (Babcock-Roberson & Strickland, 2010), it may enhance and wide their role perceptions, responsibilities (Rich, et al., 2010) and that will be more likely to display proactive helpful behavior such as extra-role behavior (Blader & Tyler, 2009) and employee voice. Conversely, when individuals who are less engagement, a sense of energetic, effort and intrinsic motivation to be dedicated to their role (Sonnentag, 2003). In this case employees have less physical, emotional, psychological resources connected toward the work (Kahn, 1990), and have less intention in engage extra-role behavior and voice to supervisor. Several empirical findings have further suggested the work engagement has positive effects on employee’s proactive behavior. For instance, Salanova & Schaufeli (2008), who conducted two survey studies in Spain and Netherlands, and discovered that work engagement was positively correlated with employee proactive behavior. Moreover, in another study, Sonnentag (2003) used daily survey over a period 5 consecutive work days, and found that day-level work engagement was positively in shaping day-level proactive behavior.
Accordingly, based on the aforementioned arguments and research findings, we propose the following proposition:
Proposition 2: Work engagement will be positive related to voice behavior.
The Moderating Role of Promotion Focus
Regulatory focus theory posits that how individuals pursue goal in the processes through approach pleasure and avoid pain (Brockner & Higgins, 2001; Higgins, 1997, 1998; Kark & Van Dijk, 2008;
MarKovits, et al., 2008). Self-regulation refers to the process in which people seek to align themselves (i.e.
their behavior and self-conceptions) with appropriate goals or standards (Brockner & Higgins, 2001). As noted earlier, two distinct hedonic types of self-regulatory systems has been mention: promotion focus and prevention focus (Brockner & Higgins, 2001; Higgins, 1997, 1998). Promotion focus is elicited by an emphasis on growth needs, attention to gains, and the attainment of aspirations and ideals. In contrast, prevention focus is draw forth by stressing on security needs, avoidance of losses, and fulfilment of duties and obligations (Brockner & Higgins, 2001; Higgins, 1997, 1998; Neubert, et al., 2008; Wu, McMullen, Neubert, & Yi, 2008). Individuals with a promotion focus tend to achieve a goal and concern positive outcomes, whereas individuals with prevention focus tend to avoid failure and concern for security (Cropanzano, Paddock, Rupp, Bagger, & Baldwin, 2008; De Cremer, et al., 2009).
A considerable amount of research has suggested that individuals regulate state can be elicited by leader behaviors (De Cremer, et al., 2009; Kark & Van Dijk, 2007; Neubert, et al., 2008). In view of our earlier discussion, ethical leader emphasize altruistic orientation to support personal growth and career
development for employee (Mahsud, et al., 2010). Rely on regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997, 1998), employees perceived with such behaviors satisfy their needs and be elicited promotion focus. Because ethical leaders give empowerment and encourage employees to pursue their desires and ideals (Mahsud, et al., 2010), by doing so, individuals with a promotion focus will be motivated but prevention focus will be not evoked. According to this line, we anticipated that employees with promotion focus will be motivated to engage more work engagement by leaders with ethical leader behavior. More precisely, when employees with high promotion focus are likely to be pursing opportunity to achieve aspirations and desirable outcomes, their goals that are match with the values that ethical leadership behavior make salient, in that congruence contribute to higher in motivation to work engagement. Consequently, we predicted the following proposition:
Proposition 3: The positive relationship between ethical leadership and work engagement is moderated by employee promotion focus, such that the relationship is stronger for employee high in promotion focus.
The Mediating Role of Work Engagement
Prior studies states that ethical leadership behaviors convey high moral standards to employees, concern for openness to input, fair treatment to followers, and encourage follower to speak up (Brown, et al., 2005; Walumbwa & Schaubroeck, 2009). In doing so, employees are seen leaders behaviors as honesty, integrity and role model, they are trust leader will concern the right ways, thereby willingness to take risk to report problems to the leaders (Brown, et al., 2005). In line with the argument, past research has demonstrated that employees perceived supervisors display more ethical leadership behaviors tended to more voice behavior (Brown, et al., 2005; De Hoogh & Den Hartog, 2008; Walumbwa & Schaubroeck, 2009).
We asserted that work engagement may mediate the process in link ethical leadership to voice behavior. As mentioned previously, we expected that ethical leadership behaviors will be positive link to work engagement because ethical leader considerate the needs of each employees to place in matching work roles and empower to them, helpful increasing work meaningfulness and facilitating their work engagement (Zhu, et al., 2004), which in turn discretionary contribute suggestions and opinions to organization (Blader
& Tyler, 2009).
As noted earlier, ethical leadership may positive related to voice behavior, however, ethical leadership may has stronger positive effects on voice behavior when individual with higher promotion focus.
Furthermore, depending on regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997, 1998), employee promotion focus may be influenced by ethical behavior, and positively related to voice behavior when work engagement as a mediator. Therefore, we contend that promotion focus may be influenced the effect of ethical leadership on voice behavior. Taken together, we argue that ethical leadership behavior will be positively associated with work engagement and voice behavior when employees self regulatory focus as driven more by promotion focus. Thus, the following is proposed:
Proposition 4: Work engagement mediates the interactive effects of ethical leadership and promotion focus on employee voice behavior.