CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 241Job Satisfaction and Organizational BehaviorTeam Dynamics and PerformanceWorkplace Violence and Bullying

Why and When Leaders’ Affective States Influence Employee Upward Voice

Open access
Liu, Wu, Song, Zhaoli, Li, Xian, Liao, Zhenyu·2017·Academy of Management Journal
DOI 10.5465/amj.2013.1082
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

Although researchers have argued that employees often carefully examine social contexts before speaking up to leaders, the role of leaders’ affective states has received little attention. The current research addresses this important issue from an emotion-as-social-information perspective by exploring whether, why, and when leaders’ affect influences employees’ voice behavior. By collecting data of 640 daily interactions from both sides of 85 leader–employee dyads using the experience sampling method through mobile surveys, we found that leaders’ positive affect was positively related to employees’ voice behavior. Furthermore, such a relationship could be accounted for through employees’ psychological safety directly via the emotional contagion mechanism (through employees’ own positive affect) but not directly via the signaling mechanism (through employees’ assessment of leaders’ positive affect); and the effects of both employees’ own positive affect and their assessments of leaders’ positive affect on psychological safety were stronger when the leader–member exchange relationship was weak. Interestingly, we also found that leaders’ negative affect was positively related to employees’ voice, but neither emotional contagion nor signaling mechanisms explained this effect. These findings highlight the important role of leaders’ affect in the voice process and also provide insights for when employees would choose to speak up to their leaders.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.5465/amj.2013.1082

Cites

121 of 121 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Employees made more suggestions for improving work practices and performance when peers and leaders displayed happiness and enthusiasm, due to greater perceived psychological safety and reciprocal positive affect.

    “Employees made more suggestions for improving work practices and performance when peers (Liu et al. 2015) and leaders (Liu et al. 2017) displayed happiness and enthusiasm, due to greater perceived psychological safety and reciprocal positive affect.”

    From The Social Effects of Emotions (2022) · cites this paper as Liu et al. 2017

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

1 of the 122 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 21

  1. Aguinis, H., Gottfredson, R. K., & Culpepper, S. A. 2013. Best-practice recommendations for estimating cross-level interaction effects using multilevel modeling. Journal of Management, 39: 1-39.
  2. Barger, P.B., & Grandey, A.A. 2006. Service with a smile and encounter satisfaction: Emotional contagion and appraisal mechanisms. Academy of Management Journal, 40: 1220-1238.
  3. Blau, P. M. 1964. Exchange and power in social life. New York: John Wiley.
  4. Dutton, J. E., Ashford, S. J., Wierba, E.E., O'Neill, R., & Hayes, E. 1997. Reading the wind: How middle managers assess the context for issue selling to top managers. Strategic Management Journal, 15: 407-425.
  5. Eckel, C.C., & Wilson, R.K. 2003. The human face of game theory: Trust and reciprocity in sequential games. In: Ostrom, E., Walker, J., (Eds). Trust and Reciprocity: Interdisciplinary Lessons from Experimental Research. New York: Russel Sage Foundation, pp. 245-274.
  6. Elfenbein, H. A. 2007. Chapter 7: Emotion in organizations. Academy of Management Annals, 1: 315-386.
  7. Frese, M., & Fay, D. 2001. Personal initiative (PI): An active performance concept for work in the 21st century. In B.M. Staw & R.M. Sutton (Eds.), Research in Organizational Behavior (Vol. 23, pp. 133-187). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science.
  8. Frijda, N. H. 1986. The emotions. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
  9. George, J. M., & Brief, A. P. 1992. Feeling good-doing good: A conceptual analysis of the mood at work-organizational spontaneity relationship. Psychological Bulletin, 112: 310- 329.
  10. Grant, A.M. 2013. Rocking the boat but keeping it steady: the role of emotion regulation in employee voice. Academy of Management Journal, 56: 1703-1723.
  11. Grant, A. M., & Ashford, S. J. 2008. The dynamics of proactivity at work. In B. M. Staw & A. Brief (Eds.), Research in Organizational Behavior, vol. 28, 3-34.Greenwich, CT: JAI.
  12. Harvey, P., Martinko, M.J., & Douglas, S.C. (2009). Causal perceptions and the decision to speak up or pipe down. In J. Greenberg & M. Edwards (Eds.), Voice and silence in organizations (pp. 63-82). Bingley, England: Emerald University Press, New York, NY.
  13. Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J.T., & Rapson, R.L. 1994. Emotional Contagion, Cambridge
  14. Li, H., & Townsend, L. 2008. Mobile research in marketing: Design and implementation issues. International Journal of Mobile Marketing, 3: 32-40.
  15. Liu, W., Tangirala, S., Lam, W., Chen, Z., Jia, R., & Huang, X. 2015. When and why peers' positive mood influences team members' voice behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100: 976-989.
  16. Luthans, F. 2002. The need for and meaning of positive organizational behavior. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 23: 695-706.
  17. Luthans, F., & Youssef, C. M. 2007. Emerging positive organizational behavior. Journal of Management, 33: 321-349.
  18. Manstead, A. S. R. 1991. Emotion in social life. In A. S. R. Manstead (Ed.), Emotion in social life (pp. 353-362). London: Erlbaum.
  19. Schwarz, N. 2002. Situated cognition and the wisdom of feelings: Cognitive tuning. In L. Feldman Barrett & P. Salovey (Eds.), The wisdom in feelings (pp. 144-166). New York: Guilford.
  20. Spector, P. E., & Fox, S. 2002. An emotion-centered model of voluntary work behavior: Some parallels between counterproductive work behavior and organizational citizenship behavior. Human Resource Management Review, 12: 269-292.
  21. Vadera, A.K., Pratt, M.G., & Mishra, P. 2013. Constructive deviance in organizations: Integrating and moving forward. Journal of Management. 39: 1221-1276.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Liu, W., Song, Z., Li, X., & Liao, Z.
Affiliations
  • Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HK)
  • National University of Singapore (SG)
ORCID
Venue
Academy of Management Journal
Publisher
Academy of Management
Published
2017-02
Volume
60
Issue
1
Pages
238-263
ISSN
  • 0001-4273 (ISSN-L)
  • 1948-0989
DOI
10.5465/amj.2013.1082
OpenAlex
W2188429209
Cited by
241
References
122
Citations by year
2026: 23 · 2025: 23 · 2024: 27 · 2023: 29 · 2022: 37 · 2021: 35 · 2020: 19 · 2019: 19 · 2018: 16 · 2017: 11 · 2016: 2
FWCI
21.26
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Academy of Management Journal (publishedVersion)
  • PolyU Institutional Research Archive (Hong Kong Polytechnic University) (submittedVersion)
  • National University of Singapore (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Team Dynamics and Performance
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Workplace Violence and Bullying
Keywords
positive affect, negative affect, psychological safety, emotional contagion, signaling mechanisms, leader-member exchange, leader-employee dyads, voice behavior

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review