How Voicer Humility Influences Managerial Voice Endorsement: An Expectancy Violation Perspective

Humble employees are less inclined to speak up in a challenging and dominant manner. Drawing from the expectancy-violation theory, we argue that challenging voice expressed by humble employees can be viewed as unexpected and receives high recognition. Specifically, we examine the effects of voicer humility on violation-expectedness and violation-valence, and, subsequently, on managerial voice endorsement. Moreover, we hypothesize that manager–subordinate familiarity moderates these relationships. Results from an event-based recall study with 188 manager–subordinate dyads (Study 1) and a vignette-based experiment with 434 managers (Study 2) revealed that voicer humility was positively related to managerial voice endorsement via violation-expectedness and violation-valence. Furthermore, we found that the positive relationship between voicer humility and violation-expectedness, as well as the positive relationship between voicer humility and violation-valence, were stronger when manager–subordinate familiarity was higher. We also discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings and directions for future research.