Content area
Full Text
1. Introduction
Employees have been required to increase proactivity in their work performance to cope with an increasingly dynamic hospitality environment. Meanwhile, hospitality organizations have gradually shifted their focus to encourage employees to actively seek opportunities for improvement, while many practitioners and researchers have identified proactivity at work as a competitive edge for organizational success (Chen et al., 2017; Loi et al., 2014).
Voice behavior is regarded as a form of proactive behavior (Hung et al., 2012; Loi et al., 2014; Wu and Parker, 2017) and includes suggestions that identify potential opportunities and crises for change, thereby possibly challenging the status quo of existing thoughts and routines (Morrison, 2011). Liang et al. (2012) recognized the critical role of voice in promoting organizational effectiveness and preventing potential problems and identified promotive and prohibitive voices. The former raises opinions and ideas to improve organizational effectiveness, whereas the latter corrects potentially serious problems to prevent organizational failure. To date, notions on promotive and prohibitive voice have been generally based on conventional perspectives, such as social support, security, obligation and self-esteem (Liang et al., 2012; Loi et al., 2014). Only a few studies have distinguished the mechanisms that lead to these two types of voice (Chamberlin et al., 2017; Lin and Johnson, 2015). Therefore, the current study advances understanding on how and why individuals engage in promotive or prohibitive voice by incorporating the notions of the proactive motivation model (Parker et al., 2010) and regulatory focus (Higgins et al., 2001).
Prior research has indicated that leaders that create a sense of confidence and cultivate positive mindsets could enhance work engagement, thereby resulting in elicited hotel employees’ voice behavior (Liang et al., 2017). Based on the proactive motivation model (Parker et al., 2010), Wu and Parker (2017) proposed the construct of leader secure-base support. Such support advocates that leaders should provide a sense of security, encouragement of growth and noninterference from the delegation. However, the relationships between such support and voice behaviors have been scarcely studied. To fill in this gap, the current study investigates why and when leader secure-base support facilitates promotive and prohibitive voices.
This study proposes that leader secure-base support facilitates subordinates’ proactive motivation, thereby driving...