Acting on Leader's Emotions: How and When Emotion Recognition Ability Motivates Voice?

Employee voice has been considered as an important means to understand the cutting-edge information, gain social status and performance advantage for leaders, employees and the organization, respectively. However, our knowledge about how and when employees' emotions influence voice remains limited.

In order to better illustrate the role of emotion on voice, based on emotion as social information theory and similarity attraction theory, we proposed a research model through which emotion recognition ability affects voice via perceived ambidextrous leadership. A sample of 182 comprised of full-time employees and their 43 immediate supervisors was collected through questionnaires in China, and analyzed via hierarchical regression method.

We found that subordinate's emotional recognition ability has a significant positive effect on promotive and prohibitive voice, and that perceived ambidextrous leadership plays a significant mediating role between subordinate's emotional recognition ability and promotive voice, while no mediating role is found between subordinate's emotional recognition ability and prohibitive voice. In addition, in contrast to leader-subordinate gender dissimilarity, leader-subordinate gender similarity is more effective in strengthening the impact of emotion recognition ability on perceived ambidextrous leadership, and thus promotes employee voice.

This research not only advances our understanding of employee voice, but also provides specific reference for management practices from the perspective of gender.