1. Introduction
An organization cannot indefinitely avoid changes under the current dynamic and highly competitive business conditions, and therefore creating and employing new ideas is crucial. Leaders should facilitate the prerequisites to change the status quo, welcome new ideas and help implement those ideas. Developing countries usually practice a bureaucratic style of leadership, in which case management is often disguised as leadership—and even more so in a country such as Pakistan, where high uncertainty avoidance, collectivism, and power distance norms prevail [
1]. Research has established that developed countries score lower on the Power Distance Index (PDI) [
2] but in developing nations like Pakistan, its influence has been established to be high [
3,
4]. This dimension is a reflection of an acceptance of hierarchical order in society and in workplaces [
4]. According to researchers, in countries scoring high on the PDI such as Pakistan, employees are afraid and reluctant to show any disagreement with their managers or to raise their voice about concerns [
3]. “The extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations and have created beliefs and institutions that try to avoid these” is measured by uncertainty avoidance [
4]. Pakistan’s score on this dimension is 70 [
5], which shows how threatened the employees here feel about raising their voice when faced with uncertain situations and ethical issues. Being a collectivist society, “where the society maintains a higher degree of interdependence among its members” [
5], employees here score relatively low on creative self-efficacy, which hinders their ability to use their voice creatively [
6]. A high-tech industry such as oil and gas requires constant innovations and up-gradations, whether it is located in Pakistan or in a developed country. Innovations and an environment encouraging voicing opinions regarding innovations are duly tied to a positive, ethical kind of leadership so that people can propose new ideas more freely. In this context, employees should be respected and treated fairly [
7], so that they respond positively to their leaders [
8]. Similar to the majority of the other developing countries, a workplace culture of being silent prevails in Pakistan and exercising one’s voice is not typically viewed as normal, mainly because of the costs and lack of leadership support.
Leaders are responsible for institutionalizing ethical standards and behaviors [
9]; they play a critical role in shaping and maintaining an ethical culture in the organization [
10]. Ethical leadership (EL) facilitates employees’ engagement and encourages them to speak up [
11]. Many studies have demonstrated the impact of EL on-employee voice, for example, see [
12,
13]. Such leaders also welcome and acknowledge followers’ ideas, connect followers in decisions, delegate powers, and establish a principled and fair structure [
14]. EL has significant contributions in promoting voice behavior, leading to the success or failure of organizational functions [
15,
16].
Ethical leaders maintain a safe climate for creating the necessary environment for voice behavior (VB). Psychological safety (PS) is a precondition that ethical leaders need to build in the organizational climate to encourage employees to propose new changes and ideas [
17]. Creating and sustaining a psychologically sheltered environment and a sense of mutual respect is one of the core traits of EL. Such environments offer the followers a sense of being safe to speak up differently [
18]. Safety against rebukes from coworkers or supervisors is vital to attract diverse views, opinions, or voices on any organizational matter. VB is subject to risks for both leaders and followers, so leaders have the ethical responsibility to provide a safe climate and encourage the followers’ voice. If leaders want their personnel to speak up, there must not exist any feelings of insecurity among employees [
10].
Moreover, leader–member exchange (LMX) can affect the relationships between EL and VB. Graen and Scandura [
19] have referred to LMX as exchanges between leaders and followers. Walumbwa et al. [
20] consider LMX as an indicator of the effectiveness of social exchange relationships between leaders and their subordinates. LMX theory, as shaped by the relationships between leaders and subordinates, states that a leader establishes different types of relationships with diverse followers to yield diverse outcomes for the employees and their organizations. Based on the norm of reciprocity in social exchange relationships, an employee with a high level of LMX is more likely to repay his/her organization in the form of positive attitudes and constructive work behaviors [
21] such as exercising one’s voice. Previous studies have taken EL as a precondition for LMX, for example, [
22] and others. However, we propose and test LMX as a boundary condition on EL–VB and on EL–PS–VB, considering LMX as a theory distinct from ethical leadership.
VB is yet in its infancy in the oil and gas sector [
23]. Afkhami Ardakani and Mehrabanfar [
24] reported the prevalence of organizational silence in the Iranian petroleum industry due to bureaucratic obstacles. Fast et al. [
25] found a positive relationship between managerial voice solicitations and employee VB in a USA petroleum firm. Mordi and Oruh [
26] identified different themes of voice in Nigeria’s petroleum industry from both managerial and employees’ perspectives. According to their study, paternalism (accepting and reinforcing unequal power distribution between supervisors and employees) and high power-distance culture both influence voice behavior. Further, both these factors are said to impact the strategies facilitating employee voice [
26]. In this context, there is a need to explore VB from the perspective of other developing countries, such as Pakistan, in which case VB is an under-researched concept. Pakistan, having a high power-distance cultural orientation, overwhelmingly practices a bureaucratic leadership style, so this study has contextual significance. Since the relationship of EL and VB has been studied through a piecemeal approach with PS and LMX, respectively, we have therefore proposed a combined moderated-mediation model which, to our knowledge, has not been studied yet. Against this backdrop, this study hopes to contribute to the existing literature on employee voice by linking the perceptions on interpersonal dynamics of how these safety feelings are constructed, understood, and facilitated by employees, for cordial employer–employee relationships.
By doing so, we add to the recent literature on ethical leadership and voice behavior in seven ways: (i) We bring literature together with related theories by examining ethical leadership and psychological safety as determinants of voice behavior. (ii) We extend the model by integrating ethical leadership and LMX (as contextual inputs/situational influences) and psychological safety (as a process or individual perception) that might be stimulated by the interaction of ethical leadership and LMX. The rationale behind this is that the processes (i.e., mediation) through which ethical leadership has been documented to exert its impact have been explored independently from the boundary conditions (i.e., moderators) under whose influence these processes may operate. Since the contextual determinants influence the effectiveness of leadership and its processes, a combined (moderated-mediated) process will help in furthering our understanding of ethical leadership. (iii) We include psychological safety as a possible mediator between ethical leadership and voice behavior which happens to be the final outcome. (iv) We embrace LMX as a possible moderator of ethical leadership and voice behavior. (v) We move beyond the group-oriented approach on voice literature in the recent past [
27]. Existing studies on EL and VB have taken up a group-focused prospect and have investigated voice as a “shared unit property”, for example, in [
27,
28], but voice inherently is supposed to belong to self-initiated actions [
29]. Thus, examining voice processes from a shared perspective undermines individual motivation and presumes that the homogeneous processes operate as far as the driving forces and manifestations of voice behavior are concerned [
28]. Additionally, analyzing EL–VB at the group level assumes the uniformity of influencing mechanisms exercised by leaders and followers’ reactions to them, ignoring the significance of the interpersonal nature of leaders’ relationships with their followers [
30]. This study argues and tests individualized influences of ethical leadership on employees’ voice behavior via employees’ sense of psychological safety and under the influence of one-to-one LMX interactions. (vi) We test the model in the oil and gas sector (a relatively unexplored industry of Pakistan regarding voice behavior). (vii) Expansion of the ethical leadership–employee voice research in a different context (e.g., in the country of Pakistan and culture which is collectivist and power distant) is the final contribution. Notably, voice behavior-related research conducted in Pakistan is insufficient compared to that conducted in other developed countries of the globe. Hence, now there is a need to expand the research context which will enhance the explanatory potential of ethical leadership, LMX, and psychological safety in promoting voice behavior and applicability of our theoretical framework in the oil and gas sector of Pakistan.
2. Literature Review
Social exchange theory (SET) [
31] states that trusting or transactional relationships are developed among members of the organization based on mutual experiences and norms of reciprocity [
32]. Those relations could be financial benefits and/or social networks [
33]. SET also confirms the idea of followers copying and internalizing the behavior they observe in their leaders. Followers reciprocate more when they are treated carefully and fairly.
EL is rooted in and aligned with SET in that EL behavior drives the ethically sound behavior of the employees. Therefore, leaders can support the values and norms of the organization and can even change the organizational culture. SET outcomes also include VB [
34,
35,
36]. EL is positively linked with VB [
37]. PS is also rooted in SET [
38], and the entirety of the social exchange system influences the employees’ PS [
39]. EL is the predecessor to PS [
18]. An individual’s psychological perception of the organizational climate, whether safe or not, has an impact on choosing VB as a social exchange [
40]. PS has been part (a mediator) of a wider social exchange process, including EL and VB [
18]. LMX characterizes the strengths of exchange relationships between employees and their supervisors [
19]. LMX is the extent of the social exchange relationships between supervisors and subordinates with the prospect to impact subordinates’ conduct and sense of obligation [
41]. Leaders’ relationships with employees are nurtured and developed over time varying from employee to employee, and can broadly be seen as either high-quality or low-quality social exchange relationships.
Theoretically, there are two main reasons for leadership behavior affecting the followers’ VB [
42]. Firstly, speaking up comprises sharing ideas and thoughts with superiors/leaders for assumed allocation of resources to the identified concerns [
43]. Secondly, leaders have control over followers’ salaries, appraisals, duties, and promotions, which signals to the followers that their voices can bring reprimands or rewards administered by their leaders [
44]. VB is a central tenet of EL [
45]. Ethical leaders provide a voice to their followers [
30]. They express high ethical standards, encouraging the employees to express their views on the existing situations and propose new ideas of improvement on ethical matters, work contexts, and processes. Brown et al. [
30] described that ethical leader have an important relationship with employees’ readiness to report workplace problems to their management, which is a part of the VB concept [
45]. Empirically, EL has a positive impact on VB (e.g., [
11,
37,
46,
47,
48,
49,
50,
51]). So, we can hypothesize that EL increases the level of employees’ voice behavior in the workplace:
Hypothesis 1. Ethical leadership significantly predicts voice behavior.
Leaders who promote employee inclusiveness increase the sense of psychological safety by diminishing the effects of status [
52]. Inclusiveness also elevates decisions’ quality and favors learning from failures [
53]. An employee feels safe and productive when able to express his/her view or voice, and s/he does gain psychological benefits in the process. A relationship emerges as ethical leaders promote a climate of taking responsibility for one’s work assignments, clarify behavioral roles and accepted norms, and articulate moral standards [
8]. Such clarity reduces uncertainty and cultivates a psychologically safe climate [
54]. Ethical leaders improve mutual trust, communicate with openness, respect their followers, show genuine concern for them, consider their personal situations, and provide emotional and instrumental support to the followers. Thus, they promote a psychologically safe climate by adopting these behaviors [
30,
38]. Through leaders’ enactment of these behaviors, followers feel respected and valued, thereby developing a shared perception of PS, leading to the expression of their true selves [
55]. Empirical evidence supports these arguments, e.g., [
18,
56,
57], hence, we hypothesize:
Hypothesis 2. Ethical leadership significantly predicts psychological safety.
Edmondson [
34], referred to psychological safety as the employee’s faith that his voice will not be disregarded by his colleagues, supervisor, or any other member of his team. Such a voice could be an inquiry, feedback, reporting a discrepancy, or proposing a new and positive idea [
58,
59,
60]. Hence, employees will be more involved in voice behavior when they sense that the negative implications associated with speaking up are minimal, in which case they will find it more convenient to express their points of view, whereas they would prefer silence when they feel the opposite [
34,
60,
61]. Employees count the costs and benefits before they speak, and thus psychological safety is described as a vital factor that can influence the employees’ voice [
62]. For example, employees opt for defensive silence instead of speaking up if they fear important personal losses such as restricted career growth and loss of social facilitation from colleagues and superiors. Leaders’ gestures or behaviors are the indicators which employees use to examine if volunteer expression of the unsolicited information is safe or unsafe, as usually the power holders have the compensating and approving authority [
15]. Leaders who are keen to involve their followers, personally acknowledge their inputs, carefully notice their efforts, and reciprocate with appropriate actions indicating that speaking the truth is not always harmful or risky [
58,
63]. Such collaboration minimizes the risks even greater in high power-distance cultures and enhances VB [
64,
65]. Many scholars have empirically validated the PS and VB relationship (e.g., [
17,
18,
48,
66,
67,
68,
69,
70,
71]). To further validate the hypothesis, we developed the following:
Hypothesis 3. Psychological safety significantly predicts voice behavior.
Voice behavior is a deliberate act that takes into account its implications, i.e., what can organizational members win or lose by raising their voice over a certain matter. Detert and Burris [
59] stated that psychological safety would be understood as a belief which safeguards risky behaviors such as raising one’s voice against the potential harms to the participating individuals. Edmondson [
34] further elaborated this belief as a “shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” To create a psychologically safe atmosphere, the leader plays a vital role by elevating psychological trust through the removal of obstructions that can thwart the expression of followers’ ideas. Kark and Carmeli [
71], described that feeling psychologically safe helps the employees to manage their stress and utilize new ideas and suggestions in a better way. Walumbwa and Schaubroeck [
18] stated that feeling psychologically safe is an environment that mirrors high-level trust and mutual respect at the workplace.
Consequently, the factor of psychological safety mediates the relationship between a leader’s behavior (deemed as external stimulus) and a follower’s choice of staying silent or speaking up (an internal stimulus). Such perception confirms the findings of Podsakoff et al. [
72], who described that followers’ faith in leadership—where faith is taken as a factor equivalent to psychological safety—assures others that leaders will not harm followers upon voicing their views or similar actions. According to multiple studies, psychological safety mediates the relationships between ethical leaders and voice behavior [
17,
18,
73], but it should be noted that this finding is not unequivocal and was not replicated in the most recent papers on this topic [
48]. Taking into account the abovementioned results, we postulated that:
Hypothesis 4. Psychological safety mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and voice behavior.
LMX can influence followers’ behavior and commitments through healthy interactions and gauges the extent and effectiveness of social exchange relationships between leaders and their followers [
19,
41]. According to LMX theory, there exist disparities in social exchange relationships when leaders and followers interact [
74,
75]. Owing to these disparities, the leader–member social exchange relationships can be described either as high-quality exchanges or low-quality exchanges. The ethical leader will be more likely to enable followers to define themselves in terms of the leader–follower relationship. Followers in high-quality exchange relationships with their leaders experience the leaders’ concern, liking, and care, which proves beneficial in developing followers’ confidence in their own capabilities. Such trust, care, and concern from the leaders in high-quality exchanges persuade followers to imitate leaders’ actions [
76]. Not only is greater autonomy experienced by these followers [
77], but they are the recipients of enhanced and useful developmental feedback from the leaders, which additionally causes an increase in followers’ self-efficacy [
78], and hence an increase in exercising voice behavior. On the contrary, followers in low-quality exchange relationships with their leaders experience less effective interactions, are not frequently guided, feel less supported by their leaders, and are assigned fewer responsibilities on account of distrust [
79], all of which reduces their opportunities to exercise their voice.
The above statement proposed by LMX theory can be extended to ethical leaders and to those group members who would perceive ethical leaders as trustworthy and attractive, begetting effective and greater interaction, and benefiting highly from ethical leaders’ conduct and hence receiving more opportunities to speak up. On the other hand, some will benefit less from their ethical leaders, namely those in low-quality relationships, which would limit their willingness to speak up. Moreover, observing at the scale level, the items of these two constructs, ethical leadership (e.g., “My leader makes fair and balanced decisions”) and LMX (e.g., “My supervisor and I are suited to each other”), happen to be independent and different from each other. Ethical leadership accounts for a leader’s overall moral conduct, whereas LMX demonstrates a leader’s relationship quality with a particular follower. This study, therefore, assumes that an interaction exists between LMX and ethical leadership. Hence, LMX, by affecting followers’ receptiveness to the influence of ethical leaders, is hypothesized to moderate the relationship between ethical leadership and followers’ voice behavior. In this situation, the relationship is expected to be stronger for the employees having high-quality social exchanges with their leaders. The existence of and implications for differences in the quality of relationships between ethical leaders and their followers have yet to be fully explored [
80]. Additionally, using the socio-contextual lens, high-quality LMX can be viewed as a contributing factor to strengthen the impact of ethical leadership on followers’ VB. A low-quality LMX exchange, conversely, serves as an inhibitor that weakens the relationship of EL and employees’ VB.
Previous empirical research revealed that employees would engage in VB when they sensed high-quality LMX relationships with their supervisors [
81]. In contrast to this, subordinates having low-level LMX relationships with their supervisors usually hesitate to use their voice [
74]. Instead of using LMX as a moderator, the extant literature, with the exception of Neubert et al. [
82], has rather used LMX as a mediator (e.g., [
51,
83]) in the EL–VB relationship. Nazir et al. [
84], while studying benevolent leadership and VB, suggested using LMX as a moderator with other positive types of leadership. In response to these, we have developed the following:
Hypothesis 5. LMX will moderate the relationship of ethical leadership with voice behavior.
Ethical leaders care about the psychological well-being of their followers [
10]. LMX, as the crucial interacting unit, acts as a vehicle for both the conception and further development of psychological safety perceptions among the employees. Through LMX, ethical leaders become able to exert positive psychological influence over employees [
85]. Since high-quality LMX exchanges build supportive and trusting relationships, employees with whom ethical leaders enjoy high-quality LMX exchanges feel psychologically safe. These employees enjoy more access to relevant information, as ethical leaders give them the right conditions to work. These right conditions range from the provision of flexible work arrangements to the authority to take new initiatives with the acceptability of even failing at them without fearing embarrassment, retaliation, and negative repercussions [
54], all of which contribute to psychological safety perceptions. Thus, we contend that such employees with the right information are better positioned to give relevant work ideas or even question wrong work processes. Hence, Uhl-Bien and Maslyn [
86] argue that the natural outcome of psychological safety is to drive voice behavior. While this may be easier said than done, we assert that employees who perceive greater psychological safety influenced by LMX with ethical leaders can arguably be better equipped and confident to raise their voice.
Previous literature has validated the relationship between LMX and psychological safety [
87]. PS has also been studied as a mediator in the relationship between LMX and VB e.g., [
88,
89]. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, only Neubert et al. [
82] have reported the moderation of LMX on the relationship of EL with VB through a mediator, i.e., a promotion focus (moderated-mediation model). Another empirical study, by Niu et al. [
90], found LMX to be moderating the mediated relationship between inclusive leadership and VB. Given that LMX is influential in facilitating psychological safety coupled with the non-existence of empirical validation of our proposed model, we confidently propose that:
Hypothesis 6. LMX will moderate the relationship between ethical leadership and voice behavior mediated by psychological safety, such that voice behavior will be high with the high values of LMX and vice versa.