Disempowering defensive silence: The role of empowering leadership, sense of power, and dyadic tenure

• Autor(a) principal: Almeida, Santiago Barros de
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/20793
• topic: Defensive silence; Empowering leadership; Sense of power; Dyadic tenure; Silêncio defensivo; Liderança empoderadora; Sentido de poder pessoal; Tempo da díade

Employees’ silence is a problem for organizations, but research has not sufficiently addressed this behavior, especially the hard-to-change emotion-based defensive silence. Leadership plays an important role in explaining silence, but, although it is essentially a power-related construct, this relationship has not deserved enough attention from scholars from a power standpoint, i.e., empowering leadership. From an approach-inhibition theory perspective, sense of power is a suitable variable that depicts the psychological process that may mediate the relationship between empowering leadership and defensive silence. Likewise, as a process, it may require time to take place. In line with this, the present study tests whether empowering leadership plays a relevant role in decreasing defensive silence, through the subordinate's sense of power, as a mediator. This study contemplates dyadic tenure as a moderator in the mediation because, in leadership studies, it is important to assume a temporal approach. With a sample of 227 employees, findings show the hypothesized indirect effect as well as a moderation of dyadic tenure in the direct effect where empowering leadership is counterproductive in low tenured dyadic relations. Findings are discussed at the light of theory, suggesting a novel mediational path that accounts for considerable variance in defensive silence. Implications for research and practice are considered.