Negative mood and employee voice: The moderating role of leadership

We applied mood-as-information theory to investigate the effect of negative mood on prohibitive and promotive employee voice, and the moderating role of transformational and transactional leadership styles in this relationship. We recruited a paired employee–supervisor sample, comprising 48 supervisors who rated their employees’ promotive and prohibitive voice, and 224 employees who completed measures of negative affect and their supervisors’ transformational and transactional leadership. Our results showed that negative mood enhanced prohibitive voice but reduced promotive voice. Further, transformational leadership weakened the effect of negative mood on voice, whereas transactional leadership reinforced this effect. The research results provide a solid theoretical basis for managers to manage their negative mood by changing their leadership behavior, and provide a new perspective for leaders to develop employee management strategies, and develop an objective and impartial evaluation system based on the intuitive external behaviors of employees.