Paternalistic Leadership Styles and Employee Voice: The Roles of Trust in Supervisors and Self-Efficacy

The purpose of this paper is to test the role of trust in supervisors in mediating the link between paternalistic leadership styles and employee voice and to investigate the contingency role of self-efficacy on the relationship between trust in supervisors and employee voices. We designed the items using survey questionnaires that were assessed by prior studies and collected data from 485 highly skilled employees of manufacturing organizations. To assess the validity of the suggested hypotheses, we used a Baron and Kenny (1986) approach and conducted hierarchical regression analysis. The findings reveal that authoritarian leadership and moral leadership styles are significantly related to trust in supervisors, which explains the association between authoritarian leadership style, and moral leadership style and employee voice. However, the results suggest that trust in supervisors does not explain the association between benevolent leadership style and employee voice. Moreover, the findings reveal that self-efficacy moderates the link between trust in supervisors and employee voice. The originality of this work lies in the fact that this research is the first to test the mediating role of trust in supervisors in the relationship between paternalistic leadership styles and employee voice and the moderating role of self-efficacy on the association between trust in supervisors and employee voice.