How Voicer Humility Influences Managerial Voice Endorsement: An Expectancy Violation Perspective

Abstract Humble employees are less inclined to speak up in a challenging and dominant manner. Drawing from the expectancy‐violation theory, we argue that challenging voice expressed by humble employees can be viewed as unexpected and receives high recognition. Specifically, we examine the effects of voicer humility on violation‐expectedness and violation‐valence, and, subsequently, on managerial voice endorsement. Moreover, we hypothesize that manager–subordinate familiarity moderates these relationships. Results from an event‐based recall study with 188 manager–subordinate dyads (Study 1) and a vignette‐based experiment with 434 managers (Study 2) revealed that voicer humility was positively related to managerial voice endorsement via violation‐expectedness and violation‐valence. Furthermore, we found that the positive relationship between voicer humility and violation‐expectedness, as well as the positive relationship between voicer humility and violation‐valence, were stronger when manager–subordinate familiarity was higher. We also discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings and directions for future research.