Voicing concerns for greater engagement. Does a supervisor’s job insecurity and organizational culture matter?
| Date | 03 April 2018 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EBHRM-12-2016-0034 |
| Published date | 03 April 2018 |
| Pages | 54-65 |
| Author | Manish Gupta,Sindhu Ravindranath,Y.L.N. Kumar |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Global HRM |
Voicing concerns for greater
engagement
Does a supervisor’s job insecurity and
organizational culture matter?
Manish Gupta and Sindhu Ravindranath
Department of Human Resources, IBS, IFHE Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India, and
Y.L.N. Kumar
Department of Human Resources, NMIMS Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India
Abstract
Purpose –Scholars argue that supervisor’s job insecurity may affect subordinates’work engagement.
Moreover, this relationship may be mediated by subordinates’pro-social voice and the relationship between
the supervisor’s job insecurity and subordinates’pro-social voice may be moderated by organizational
culture. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is twofold. First, to examine the mediating role of the
subordinate’s pro-social voice between supervisor’s job insecurity and subordinates’work engagement.
Second, to test the moderating role of organizational culture between supervisor’s job insecurity and the
subordinates’pro-social voice.
Design/methodology/approach –Data were gathered from employees of a large hospital in India using
face-to-face data cross-sectional survey method. To test the proposed hypotheses, ordinary least squares
regression analysis was performed on the data obtained.
Findings –The results indicated support for the proposed model in two ways. First, the subordinate’s
pro-social voice mediated the relationship between supervisor’s job insecurity and the subordinate’s work
engagement. Second, organizational culture acted as a moderator between supervisor’s job insecurity and the
subordinate’s pro-social voice.
Research limitations/implications –The results augment social exchange theory by identifying the
crucial role that voicing concerns plays in reducing the negative impact of supervisor’s job insecurity on
the subordinates’work engagement.
Practical implications –The study findings encourage managers to create an organizational culture that
allows the subordinates to challenge their supervisor’s decisions.
Originality/value –To the best of the researchers’knowledge, this is the first study to test job insecurity of
the supervisors instead of the same respondents as a predictor of pro-social voice.
Keywords Job insecurity, Work engagement, Organizational culture, Employee voice
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Engaged employees are assets for any organization primarily because they are vigorous,
dedicated, and fully absorbed in their work role (Van De Voorde et al., 2016). Therefore,
the efforts put in by scholars in the direction of exploring the factors affecting employee
engagement are of paramount importance (Akhtar et al., 2015). A sizable literature provides
evidence that supervisors’positive behavior and other related organizational factors have a
strong effect on the level of employee engagement (e.g. Hsieh and Wang, 2015; Pohl and
Galletta, 2017; Van Dierendonck, 2015; Zhong et al., 2015).
Most studies examine the extent to which positive “motivational”factors enhance work
engagement levels of the employees (e.g. Barrick et al., 2015; Yadav and Rangnekar, 2015;
Joo and Lee, 2017). However, the role of negative factors cannot be completely written off
(Ivtzan et al., 2015). Factors such as supervisor’s job insecurity may reduce employees’
attachment with their work (Wrape, 2015) because insecure supervisors per ceive
subordinates as a threat and tend to create hurdles to ensure that they do not perform
(Scharff, 2014).
Evidence-based HRM: a Global
Forum for Empirical Scholarship
Vol. 6 No. 1, 2018
pp. 54-65
© Emerald PublishingLimited
2049-3983
DOI 10.1108/EBHRM-12-2016-0034
Received 31 December 2016
Revised 6 May 2017
Accepted 9 June 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2049-3983.htm
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EBHRM
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