关键词: 政治技能, 沉默行为, 领导信任, 权力距离倾向

Abstract: Employee silence refers to the behavior of employees deliberately withholding their true opinions about organizational issues or ideas related to improving the organization. Studies show that employee silence in the organization will affect the timely feedback of information of organizational management, reduce the quality of organizational decision-making and the ability to correct mistakes, and hinder the progress and development of the organization. As an important component of organizational environment, leader is considered to be one of the key factors affecting employee silence. leaders’ personal characteristics and management styles have received extensive attention from scholars in research, yet far less attention has been put to the leaders’ personal abilities, such as leader political skill (LPS). LPS is defined as the ability to effectively understand others at work and to use such knowledge to influence others to act in ways that enhance leader's personal and/or organizational objectives. Previous studies have shown that psychological state may play an important role in the relationship between LPS and employees’ work behavior. However, few researchers examine the underlying mechanism. In order to make up for this research gap, we built a moderated mediation model based on social exchange theory. We investigated the influence of LPS on employee silence from the perspectives of work team and individual. Moreover, the mediating role of trust in leader (TIL) and the moderating role of power distance (PD) were examined. In this study, we adopted a multi-temporal longitudinal research design, in order to reduce the common method biases, this survey distributed the questionnaires in three stages, with one interval between each stage. The data was collected from eastern coastal cities of China, and a total of 255 employees (54.1% were male, 52.5% were with bachelor’s degree, mean age=27.98) from 68 work teams (mean size=3.75) returned the questionnaires. To examine the distinctiveness of the study variables, we first conducted a confirmatory factor analysis by using SPSS 23.0, then we employed Mplus 7.4 to test our hypotheses. The results of the multi-level linear model showed that: (1) at the team level, LPS was significantly positively correlated with TIL (γ = .29, p <.01); TIL was significantly negatively correlated with silent behavior (γ = -1.47, p <.001); (2) at the individual level, LPS was significantly positively correlated with TIL (β = .25, p <.001); TIL and silent behavior were significantly negatively correlated (β = -.20, p <.05); TIL played a mediating role between LPS and silent behavior (unstandardized indirect effect =-.05, 95% CI [-.10, -.00]). Our findings provided some theoretical and practical implications. Firstly, the previous studies rarely focused on the relationship between leader's ability and employee silence. Our research enriched the relevant field. Secondly, this research examined the mediating mechanism of TIL, expanded researchers’ understanding of the relationship between leader’s ability and subordinates’ behavior. Beyond the theoretical implications highlighted above, there are a number of practical strategies that organizations can put into practice. Firstly, due to the importance of LPS, organizational managers should increase their attention to political skills when conducting leadership selection or training. Secondly, organizations can increase employees’ trust in leader by improving the relationship between superiors and subordinates, establishing a sense of organizational fairness or a positive and sincere communication atmosphere, thereby reducing employee silence.

Key words: political skill, employee silence, trust in leader, power distance