Supplemental Materials
I Will Speak Up If My Voice Is Socially Desirable: A Moderated Mediating Process of Promotive Versus Prohibitive Voice
by X. Wei et al., 2015, Journal of Applied Psychology
As the voice literature suggests voice may elicit conflicts, resulting in potential costs in relationships and careers, we developed the scale of perceived risk of voice integrating the scale for the perceived relationship costs (Zhang, Zhang, & Wang, 2011) in the conflict literature, the findings about fears and beliefs (Milliken, Hewlin, & Morrrison, 2003) in the voice literature, and a scale development study for this research.
The scale for the perceived relationship costs was developed in an implicit conflict situation in social life, in which the role relationship between the parties was not identified (see Zhang et al., 2011). There were six items to measure the costs in terms of relationship disruption. Of these items, two were irrelevant to voicesituations: “He/she will think I am penny-pinching” and “He/she will think that I am not humane enough”, we thus dropped them and used the other 4 items, including “He/she would think that I do not respect him/her”, “I will offend him/her”, “Our relationship will deteriorate”, and “He/she would think that I hurt his/her face”.
Besides the concern about relationship costs, employees may perceive voice to be associated with other risks. For example, they may worry about managerial retaliation that undermine their career trajectories, as the target of voice, the supervisor, has power over the subordinate through assigning tasks, evaluating his/her performance, and so forth. In a qualitative study, Milliken et al. (2003) found that employees hold a variety of fears and beliefs about voice outcomes. Herein we adapted the items that are most relevant for our research, including fear of being labelled negatively (“as a troublemaker or complainer”, and “as a tattletale”), fear of damaging a relationship (“loss of trust and respect”, and “loss of acceptance and support”), and fear of retaliation or punishment (“losing job”, and “not getting promoted”).
In addition, we conducted a scale development study for this research. We contacted 50 middle managers from different industries enrolled in a part-time MBA program in a major university in Northern China. Of the 50 participants, 32 of them provided written responses to a general, open-ended question with the following instructions: “Suppose that you are in a public setting such as a work meeting with your direct supervisor, and you have different opinions about his/her decision. You believe that his/her decision would bring harm to the organization. Generally speaking, if you express your views in such a situation, what would happen?” Respondents expressed two major worries. One is about relationship disruption, such as “hurt the supervisor’s face” (58.6%), “disrupt the relationship with the supervisor” (55.2%), and “not harmonious” (7.9%); and the other is about block to career progress, such as the supervisor “would exert negative influence on my future work” (53.4%), “would regard me as a trouble-maker” (20.7%), “would not assign me good job opportunities” (13.8%), “threaten my position in the organization” (3.5%), etc.
We integrated the aboveresponses, the four items from the scale for perceived relationship costs, and the items regarding fear and beliefs about voice, and asked 3 doctoral students to play as expert judges to evaluate the redundancy of these items and the extent to which they matched the definition of perceived risk (Morrison, 2011).
This procedure resulted in 8 items to measure perceived risk. 4 items describe the concern for relationship disruption, including “He/she would think that I don’t respect him/her”, “I will offend him/her”, “Our relationship will deteriorate”, and “He/she would think that I hurt his/her face”. The other 4 items are aboutmanagerial retaliation associated with the disrupted relationship, including “He/she would regard me as a trouble-maker”, “I will lose important job duties assigned by him/her”, “He/she would evaluate my performance as inconsistent with the firm goal”, and “He/she will create troubles on my job in the future”.
To examine the factor structure of these 8 items, we conducted a scale validation study among middle managers from a financial service firm and a manufacturing firm when they were engaged in on-site training programs. These managers came from a variety of subsidiaries of these two firms in different districts of China. On a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1, “strongly disagree”, to 7, “strongly agree”, we asked them to report the extent to which they expected their voice to be associated with consequences listed above if they warn about the problems in supervisory decisions. Paper-based surveys were distributed to 292 middle managers, and 208returned usable questionnaires (a response rate of 71.2%). Of the valid responses, 64.9% were males, averagely aged at 35 (S.D.= 4.9), with an average tenure of 82 months (S. D. = 61.42).
We compared three alternative measurement models: the single factor model, the two-factor model, with the four relationship-related items separated from the four career-related items, and the two-factor with a higher-order latent factor model. The single factor model fits the data well, with χ2 (20) = 179.6, RMSEA = .072, CFI = .92, TLI = .90. The two-factor model showed a poorer fit than the single factor model, with χ2 (19) = 185.2, RMSEA = .099, CFI = .83, TLI = .87, with a chi-square change of 5.7 (Δdf= 1, p .05). Thetwo-factor model with a higher-order latent factor model did not show significant improvement in fit indices compared to the single factor model, χ2(18)= 176.7, RMSEA = .075, CFI = .92, TLI = .91, with a chi-square change of 2.9 (Δdf= 2, p > .10). Forthe sake of parsimony, we treated the 8 items as measuring one single latent construct—perceived risk, and this is consistent with our theorizing about this construct as well.