The Joint Effects of Voice Importance and Leader Network Ability on Actual Voice Implementation

While recent voice literature has begun to take a leader-centric perspective to explore how leaders react to employee voice, we still know little about their psychological impetus and constraints regarding ongoing voice implementation. In this paper we investigated the antecedents of leaders’ actual implementation towards employee voiced issues. Based on theory of planned theory, we posited that both issue characteristics (i.e., voice importance) and leader characteristics (i.e., network ability) affected actual voice implementation. To test our model, we observed 160 monthly meetings of 32 healthcare teams in a hospital for 5 months. Finally, 346 pieces of voice from 201 nurses were recorded and evaluated by both voicers and their nurse managers. Our results suggested that while voice importance enhanced leader voice implementation motivation towards the focal issue, it led to actual voice implementation only when leaders had high network ability. Theoretical and practical implications were also discussed. Keywords: Voice importance, voice implementation, leader network ability, theory of planned behavior