文化價值取向對員工建言行為之影響: 領導部屬交換理論是否有調節作用

Organizational environments are becoming increasingly dynamic and competitive so that it becomes more and more difficult for managers to detect, interpret and handle various business challenges and issues all by themselves. Employees’ constructive ideas and suggestions thus become critical to help managers to identify potential opportunities and address potential and current work critical problems for the organization. Therefore, employees’ voice can play as a key role in enhancing organizational functioning. The recognition of the important role of employees’ voice for organizational performance has drawn lots of research attention to identify important factors that could promote or inhibit employees’ voice behavior. Even studies on the antecedents of voice are abundant in the literature, very few pay attention to whether cultural values are also important predictors of employee voice. Therefore, the first purpose of this study is to address such research gap by empirically testing whether Hofstede’s (1984) four cultural vale dimensions (i.e., long term orientation, collectivism orientation, uncertainty avoidance orientation and power distance orientation) are important antecedents of employees’ voice behavior. Different from Hofstede’s approach that analyzing these cultural dimensions using country as the unit of analysis, the current study measures these four cultural dimensions at the individual level because there is a growing consensus that substantial cultural differences could exist within a country so that individual level of analysis on these cultural dimensions could be more informative for the greater diversity of modern businesses’ workforce (Colquitt, 2004; Cox, Lobel, & McLeod, 1991; Jackson et al., 2006). In addition to examining the possible effect of four cultural value orientations on employees’ voice, the second purpose of this study is to investigate whether one situational factor, Leader-Member Exchange (LMX), is an important moderator that would strengthen/weaken the relationships between four cultural value orientations and employees’ voice. Since there is also little research attention focusing on the association between LMX and voice, examining LMX’s moderating effect for the relationships between cultural value orientations and employees’ voice helps to address this gap. Data of this study was collected using a self-administrated questionnaire in both paper work and online format, and participants of this study were frontline employees from several mid or upscale hotels in Taiwan. The findings of this study reveal that three culture values: long-term orientation, collectivism and uncertainty avoidance all increase employees’ voice behavior. Additionally, LMX is found to lead employees who are high in long-term orientation, collectivism and uncertainty avoidance to voice more. These findings provide valuable implications regarding employee recruitment, selecting and leading for human resource managers.