Risk-facing or risk-avoiding? Group loyalty encourages subordinates to tell the truth.

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study is to understand individual motivation to speak up, which extends the application of voice behavior. Employing a cross-level moderation framework, this paper explored the relationship between employees' authoritarian leadership perceptions and their speaking-up behavior, as reported by supervisors, along with a moderating effect of group loyalty. Specifically, we propose a conceptual variable, "saying nothing but good news", which related to the choice of the selective disclosure of information to others. Utilizing data of 140 supervisors and 603 subordinates in the Taiwanese military, results of the hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analysis revealed that authoritarian leadership was negatively related to prohibitive voice, but positively related to saying nothing but good news. Group loyalty moderated the relationship between authoritarian leadership and prohibitive voice when group loyalty is high. Implications for management and future research are discussed.