Supervisor feedback, relational energy, and employee voice: the moderating role of leader–member exchange quality

Abstract

Although scholars have attempted to explore supervisor feedback as an antecedent of voice, the underlying mechanism remains under-explored. The current research addresses this critical issue from the perspective of conservation of resources theory by delineating how and when supervisor feedback influences employee voice from an energy perspective. Using dyadic data collected from 671 employees and their 218 direct supervisors in a retailer company, we found that supervisor favorable feedback increases employees’ relational energy, which, in turn, promotes employee voice. Conversely, supervisor unfavorable feedback decreases employees’ relational energy and inhibits employee voice. Furthermore, we found that leader–member exchange quality is an important boundary condition for the relationship between supervisor favorable feedback and voice via relational energy. These findings highlight the role of energy in the relationship between supervisor feedback and employee voice. They also present implications for management to improve supervisors’ skills at providing feedback.

Keywords:

• Supervisor feedback
• employee voice
• relational energy
• conservation of resources
• leader–member exchange

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editor Andrew Timming and the anonymous reviewers for their comments to this manuscript. We would like to thank the leading retailor firm for their assistance during the data collection phase.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge financial support from the fund for building world-class universities of Renmin University of China awarded to Chunling Zhu (Project No. KYGJC2022016), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, and the Research Funds of Renmin University of China awarded to Fangliang Zhang (Grant No. 20XNH096) and financial support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72102226) awarded to Chu-Ding Ling.