情绪耗竭对建言行为的U型影响--内在动机的调节作用

The U-Shaped Relationship between Emotional Exhaustion and Voice Behavior:The Moderating Effect of Intrinsic Motivation

基于资源保存理论,通过201名员工及其直接上级的配对样本,探讨了中国组织背景下员工情绪耗竭对其促进性建言与抑制性建言的非线性影响及其边界条件。研究结果表明,情绪耗竭对促进性建言与抑制性建言有显著的U型影响。与抑制性建言相比,情绪耗竭对促进型建言的U型影响更明显。内在动机显著调节了情绪耗竭对促进性建言的U型影响,对于低内在动机的员工而言,情绪耗竭对促进性建言的U型影响更明显。

In recent years:most of the studies about voice behavior are based on the social exchange theory,holding the point of view that workers use voice to reciprocate to their employers for positive treatment.However,they largely neglect another possibility that workers may also use voice to regulate the personal resources,and much less is known how workers use voice to deal with stress.Based on the conservation of recourses(COR)theory,this study elucidated a curvilinear relationship between emotional exhaustion and voice behavior(prohibitive voice and promotive voice).Besides,we tested a model in which intrinsic motivation moderated the relationship between emotional exhaustion and voice behavior.Data was collected from 220 full-time employees and their supervisors in an electric power company in Chaozhou.201 matched dyads were available,yielding an effective valid data percentage of 93.5%.Among the variables,emotional exhaustion and demographic variables were collected from the employees,while promotive voice and prohibitive voice were gathered from their supervisors.Following prior studies,we controlled employees'gender,age,education,position type,position level,the year that they join the company and dyadic tenure with their leaders to rule out alternative explanations.Correlation Analysis,Confirmative Factor Analysis,Hierarchical Regression Modeling were used to test the hypotheses.We adopted SPSS 21 and AMOS 24 software to do the analysis.Consistent with our hypotheses,regression results revealed that(1)Emotional exhaustion had a U-shaped relationship with promotive voice and prohibitive voice respectively,such that the relationship was negative for low to moderate levels of emotional exhaustion,and positive for moderate to high levels of emotional exhaustion.(2)Emotional exhaustion had a stronger effect on promotive voice than prohibitive voice.(3)Intrinsic motivation only moderated the relationship between emotional exhaustion and promotive voice.The current study provides several theoretical contributions.First,this study investigates the relationship between emotional exhaustion and voice behavior by taking the conservation of recourses perspective,which extends the antecedents of voice behavior beyond the social exchange approach and helps us better understand the psychological process underlying the use of voice.Further,we find that emotional exhaustion does not necessarily have a negative effect on voice behavior.Instead,emotional exhaustion has a U-shaped relationship with promotive voice and prohibitive voice respectively and it has a stronger effect on promotive voice.Meanwhile,grounded in the conservation of recourses(COR)theory,we further explore the concrete effects of emotional exhaustion towards promotive voice and prohibitive voice respectively,and we find that intrinsic motivation has significant mediating effects on promotive voice,such that the lower intrinsic motivation is the stronger effects the emotional exhaustion will have on promotive voice.This study has several limitations and might be improved in future studies.First,the present study only focuses on exploring the boundary conditions for the relationship between emotional exhaustion and two kinds of voice behavior.Future studies could further explore the mediating effect on emotional exhaustion towards voice behavior.Second,in this study,all samples were collected from a large electric power company,which means we should expand the data samples collected in other industries or other companies.