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How supervisors respond to employee voice: an experimental study in China and Japan

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Abstract

To examine how supervisors respond to employee voice in the Asian context, we conducted a scenario-based experiment in China and Japan and investigated the effects of the target of voice (immediate supervisors or skip-level leaders), voicing employees’ expertise, and supervisors’ sense of power on supervisors’ responses. Data from both samples showed that voicing employees’ target of voice and expertise have significant effects on the overall evaluations rated by supervisors, partially mediated by liking or perceived threat. Moreover, data from the Chinese sample showed that supervisors’ sense of power moderates the effect of voicing employees’ expertise on supervisors’ responses.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editor, Fabian Jintae Froese, for his outstanding guidance throughout the review process and the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. We gratefully acknowledge the support of Koichi Nakagawa, in the preparation of this research and his assistance with the data collection in Japan. We thank Toshio Kobayashi and Adam Cross for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. We also thank Yao Zhou, Yun Qian, Xiangyun Wu, Munkhtsetseg Ganbat, and Koharu Yasukawa for their help in collecting the data for this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Economics, Kyoto University, Yoshida-Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-8501, Japan

    Yunyue Yang

  2. School of Management, Shanghai University, 99 Shangda Road, Shanghai, 200444, China

    Jie Li

  3. Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University, Yoshida-Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-8501, Japan

    Tomoki Sekiguchi

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Appendix

Appendix

Variable

High-level manipulation

Low-level manipulation

Supervisors’ sense of power (Anderson et al. 2012)

High sense of power

Suppose that you were a department head of a company. This company is planning to expand its business overseas and you are in charge of this project. In this company, you have a lot of power. You have the power to decide work contents, personnel reshuffles, subordinates’ salary, and so on. The members of this project will perform according to your direction.

Low sense of power

Suppose that you were a department head of a company. This company is planning to expand its business overseas. Although you are in charge of this project, you don’t have a lot of power. Thus, you don’t have a lot of power to decide work contents, personnel reshuffle, subordinates’ salary, and so on. The members of this project almost not perform according to your direction.

Target of voice (Detert and Trevino 2010)

Skip-level leader target

One day, in a weekly meeting, you reported that you decide to expand business within Asia and your supervisor A was also in this meeting. After the meeting, you found that you had forgotten some documents in the meeting room, so you returned back. When you were approaching to the meeting room, you found that your subordinate B and your supervisor A were talking quietly in the meeting room.

You heard B said that “related to this project, I think tapping into the American market is better than into the Asian market and is good for the future of our company.” Besides that, B told a lot of problems related to the project to supervisor A. You didn’t hear the problems from B before, and you know that B always behaves like this from other members.

Immediate supervisor target

One day, in a weekly meeting, you reported that you decide to expand business within Asia and your supervisor A was also in this meeting. After the meeting, you found that you had forgotten some documents in the meeting room, so you returned back. On your way back to the meeting room, you met a subordinate B and he said that he has something to tell you.

B said that “related to this project, I think tapping into the American market is better than into the Asian market and is good for the future of our company.” Besides that, he told a lot of problems related to the project to you. This subordinate B always talks to you with his ideas about work-related issues like this.

Employee expertise

High expertise

Subordinate B knows much about global issues and has a good knowledge of marketing.

Low expertise

Subordinate B doesn’t know much about global issues and has little knowledge about marketing.

  1. Scenarios were originally written in Chinese and Japanese

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Yang, Y., Li, J. & Sekiguchi, T. How supervisors respond to employee voice: an experimental study in China and Japan. Asian Bus Manage 20, 1–31 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41291-019-00075-1

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