An emotional journey to speaking up: understanding when and how employee daily emotions relate to promotive and prohibitive voice

ABSTRACT

Building on the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions and the regulatory focus theory, we develop a multilevel model to investigate how employees’ daily positive and negative emotions trigger daily promotive and prohibitive voice, and further incorporate employees’ leader-member exchange (LMX) and trait self-control capacity as boundary conditions of the daily emotions-voice relationships. To test the proposed model, we conducted two studies utilizing the experience sampling method to collect daily data over 10 working days. In Study 1, we gathered 1458 daily responses from 146 employees. In Study 2, we collected 729 matched daily responses from 75 employees and their co-workers, utilizing a multi-phase design. The results of multilevel path-analyses from both studies reveal that: (1) daily positive emotions are positively related with daily promotive voice, and daily promotion focus mediates this association; (2) daily negative emotions are positively related to daily prohibitive voice, however, daily prevention focus does not mediate this relationship; (3) LMX enhances the positive relationship between daily positive emotions and daily promotive voice, and its indirect effect via daily promotion focus; and (4) self-control capacity strengthens the positive relationship between daily negative emotions and daily prohibitive voice, and its indirect effect via daily prevention focus.

KEYWORDS:

• Daily emotions
• employee voice
• leader-member exchange
• self-control capacity
• regulatory focus

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While some scholars have advocated for the application of discrete emotional theories to predict proactive behaviours (Lebel & Kamran-Morley, 2021), it is worth noting that each discrete emotion may lead to distinct outcomes and mechanisms (or even opposite predictions) regarding proactive behaviours. Consequently, a comprehensive examination of the effects of discrete emotions falls outside the scope of this paper. Instead, we focus on work-relevant emotions that are commonly experienced and that share similar valence and activation levels, such as happiness, enthusiasm, and optimism for positive emotions, and anger, anxiety, and irritation for negative emotions (Bono et al., 2007).

2. Although we did not obtain IRB approval for the present study, the proposal of data collection has been carefully reviewed by the National Science and Technology Council and obtained their full support (NSC 102-2410-H-110-037-SS3: “The antecedents, mechanisms, and consequence of employee daily emotions”). The survey data were collected anonymously and all participants provided their informed consent to participate.

3. Since employees were nested within their organizations, it also possible that organizational variances can influence out results. To address this issue, we specified a three-level model (i.e., within-person, between-person, and organization-level) and reanalysed our data. The significance and conclusions were unchanged when specifying a three-level model. Thus, we kept the two-level model for subsequent analyses.

4. After the participants completed and submitted their daily responses, the system automatically recorded their response time, which were verified by the researchers. If the responses were submitted more than two hours after the daily surveys were sent out, they were considered invalid.

5. Again, the results and conclusions were not changed when specifying our model as a three-level model.

Additional information

Funding

The current study was supported by the National Science Council of Taiwan [Grant NSC 102-2410-H-110-037-SS3].