A Source Credibility Perspective of Coworkers’ Positive Reactions to Employee Voice

Recent research on employee voice has shifted its attention from examining the antecedents of voice to investigating its consequences, especially about coworkers’ reactions to employee voice. However, knowledge on why coworkers react positively to employee voice remains limited. Drawing on source credibility theory in the communication literature, we propose that a coworker’s evaluation of the focal employee’s competence and sincerity are two key mediating mechanisms that explain why a coworker reacts positively and offers later-on help to the voicer. Furthermore, we propose that the focal employee’s friendship network centrality serves as a key moderator to these relationships, such that the positive relationship between the focal employee’s voice and a coworker’s evaluation of the focal employee’s competence and sincerity, as well as the indirect effects, are stronger when the focal employee’s friendship network centrality is lower rather than higher. Using a three-wave, multi-source round-robin survey and social relations analysis, the results largely supported our hypotheses except for the moderating effect of friendship network centrality on the competence evaluation path. Our findings provide novel insights into the mechanisms and boundary conditions that explain how coworkers react to employee voice.