Predicting Employee Voice Behavior: Exploring the Roles of Empowering Leadership, LMX and the Mediation Effect of Psychological Empowerment

When employees consciously suppress important information, suggestions or concerns from their managers, negative implications for organizational performance can emerge. Some studies suggested that employees often choose to remain silent when faced with the choice of whether or not to raise an issue. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to examine the factors that impact employee voice behavior (VB). The research theorizes that empowering leadership and Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) significantly and positively impacts employee voice behavior in UAE public sector (N=146). Moreover, this study broadens the previous research on the empowering leadership, LMX and employee voice relationship by introducing employee psychological empowerment as a mediator. The data was gathered using the online survey. The results of the statistical analysis using structural equation modeling with Smart-Partial Least Squares (PLS).3 showed that empowering leadership directly and indirectly (through psychological empowerment) impact on employee voice behavior. Surprisingly, the results presented no significant relationships between LMX and voice behavior. However, the relationships only exist through the psychological empowerment (fully mediate). Implications of the study model for management or human resource management as well as for future research are discussed. Keywords: Empowering leadership, Leader-member exchange, psychological empowerment, employee voice behavior