How and When Leaders Remain Silence and Avoidance in Response to Team Promotive Voice

Although team promotive voice is assumed to improve team effective functioning, the key to realizing its downstream benefits to teams is the role of team leaders. Indeed, team leaders may not always endorse or implement team promotive voice that is aimed at benefiting the team, but rather remain silent and engage in avoidance behavior. Drawing from social identity theory, particularly an identity threat perspective, we propose that team promotive voice can trigger leader silence and avoidance behaviors via enhanced leader identity threat. We further propose that leader team identification functions as a critical first-stage moderator of the proposed mediation relationships. Specifically, leaders with higher (vs. lower) team identification respond to team promotive voice with less identity threat and then less silence and avoidance. Results based on the field data from 46 teams with 279 team members rejected our mediation hypotheses but found that leader team identification functions as a reversing moderator such that team promotive voice increases (vs. decreases) leader identity threat and subsequent leader silence and avoidance when leader team identification is low (vs. high). Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.