The Impact of Paradoxical Leadership on Employee Voice Behavior: A Moderated Mediation Model

Paradoxical leadership is associated with positive behavioral outcomes. However, the link between paradoxical leadership and voice behavior is not comprehensively studied in extant literature. This paper builds a theoretical model to reveal how paradoxical leadership facilitates promotive and prohibitive voice behavior of employees, drawing upon social cognitive theory and regulatory focus theory. We proposed a moderated mediation model that employees’ voice behavior is related to paradoxical leadership through self-efficacy and psychological safety. With data from 268 leader – employee pairs of questionnaires, this study conducted a structural equation model to test the conceptual framework. The results show that (a) leader’s paradoxical leadership related to employee’s promotive and prohibitive voice behaviors positively; (b) employee’s self-efficacy and psychological safety mediate the extent of effect the superior’s paradoxical leadership has on subordinate’s voice behavior; (c) the more obvious the subordinate’s promotion focus orientation, the stronger the mediating effect of self-efficacy; and (d) the more obvious the subordinate’s prevention focus orientation, the weaker the mediating effect of psychological safety. These conclusions reveal the influencing mechanism of a superior’s paradoxical leadership on a subordinate’s voice behavior. It expands paradoxical leadership-related studies, enriches studies related to the field of “leader – employee voice behavior,” and highlights the relationship between the duality of paradoxical leadership behavior on employees with different regulatory focus orientation with a new perspective.