Why and When Leaders’ Affective States Influence Employee Upward Voice
从情感即社会信息视角，通过85对领导-员工配对的640次日常互动数据，发现领导者积极情感通过情绪感染机制提升员工心理安全感进而促进进言，且领导-成员交换关系弱时效应更强；领导者消极情感也促进进言但机制不明。
Although researchers have argued that employees often carefully examine social contexts before speaking up to leaders, the role of leaders’ affective states has received little attention. The current research addresses this important issue from an emotion-as-social-information perspective by exploring whether, why, and when leaders’ affect influences employees’ voice behavior. By collecting data of 640 daily interactions from both sides of 85 leader–employee dyads using the experience sampling method through mobile surveys, we found that leaders’ positive affect was positively related to employees’ voice behavior. Furthermore, such a relationship could be accounted for through employees’ psychological safety directly via the emotional contagion mechanism (through employees’ own positive affect) but not directly via the signaling mechanism (through employees’ assessment of leaders’ positive affect); and the effects of both employees’ own positive affect and their assessments of leaders’ positive affect on psychological safety were stronger when the leader–member exchange relationship was weak. Interestingly, we also found that leaders’ negative affect was positively related to employees’ voice, but neither emotional contagion nor signaling mechanisms explained this effect. These findings highlight the important role of leaders’ affect in the voice process and also provide insights for when employees would choose to speak up to their leaders.