I Treated the Way You Treated Me: The Effect of Leader Hypocrisy on Employees’ Voice Behavior

Abstract

Purpose

In recent years, due to the increasingly prominent role of voice behavior in leader decision-making and organizational performance, such behavior has become a central topic for scholars. A majority of studies explore the “uphold” effects of multiple leader behavior toward the voice behavior; nonetheless, our study revealed the “undo” effect --- leader hypocrisy on voice behavior. Drawing on social cognitive theory, we investigated the relationship between leader hypocrisy and voice behavior, examined the mediating effects of cognition-based trust and affect-based trust, and the moderating effect of moral identity.

Patients and Methods

We conducted a three-wave survey in a large Chinese corporation to test the hypothesized model. We collected 562 employees to participate in this survey.

Results

The results show that leader hypocrisy negatively impacts employees’ cognition-based and affect-based trust, and both types of trust mediate the relationship between leader hypocrisy and voice behavior, respectively. In the meantime, moral identity manifested the negative effect of leader hypocrisy on cognition-based and affect-based trust.

Conclusion

Our research not only enriches the related research on leader hypocrisy and voice behavior but also uncovers the underlying mechanism through which leader hypocrisy affects voice behavior and the boundary conditions of this effect. Meanwhile, our research provides a theoretical reference for increasing employees’ voice behavior and promoting the healthy development of enterprises.

Keywords:

• leader hypocrisy
• cognition-based trust
• affect-based trust
• voice behavior
• moral identity
• social cognitive theory

Ethics Declarations

This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the Ethics Committee of Qingdao University (Date. 2022-03-27 / No. 20220327).

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, grant number: 72301158 and the Fundamental Research Funds of Shandong University.