Employees who spot problems help the bottom line, so why do leaders give more power to bootlickers?

(Press-News.org) Two new studies find that leaders are less likely to empower followers who raise concerns about workplace decisions, even though these “challenging voice” employees play a critical role in highlighting problems and identifying solutions. The studies also outline what drives these decisions.

“We know that employee performance improves and employee turnover declines when employees are empowered – that’s good,” says Bradley Kirkman, co-author of a paper on the two studies. “We also know that having employees who use challenging voice are also beneficial to the bottom line – because this leads employees to be more creative, feel greater responsibility, innovate more, and share knowledge more often.”

So why are leaders not embracing this approach?

“That’s what we wanted to explore with these studies,” says Kirkman, who is the General (Ret.) H. Hugh Shelton Distinguished Professor of Leadership in North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management.

At issue are behaviors known as “challenging voice” and “supportive voice.” Challenging voice refers to instances when an employee raises concerns about the status quo: potentially pushing back against leadership decisions, identifying potential problems with corporate strategy, etc. Supportive voice refers to instances when an employee is supporting the status quo: encouraging leaders, praising the workplace, and so on.

For the first study, the researchers enlisted 143 professional MBAs across multiple industries in China. The researchers also enlisted 266 employees who worked for those MBAs. In total, the study included 315 dyads consisting of a leader and a follower. The leaders and followers each completed three surveys over the course of six weeks. Each survey was designed to capture the behavior of both leaders and followers, and how the behavior of the followers influenced the behavior of leaders and how they viewed the followers.

For the second study, researchers recruited 528 adults in the United States. These study participants were given a common scenario in which they were a corporate leader and then asked questions aimed at assessing the participant’s willingness to empower an employee. However, study participants were given different descriptions of the employee’s behavior.

The researchers manipulated variables to give each participant one of six different employee descriptions. Participants were randomly assigned into a situation where the employee exhibited either challenging voice or supportive voice. Participants were then randomly assigned into scenarios in which the employee exhibited high or low challenging voice or high or low supportive voice (i.e., exhibited a range of challenging or supportive behaviors), along with high or low levels of behavior that helped the leader.

“The results were consistent across both studies,” Kirkman says. “Employees who exhibited challenging voice were less likely to be empowered; employees who use supportive voice were more likely to be empowered. In other words, managers favored bootlickers over boat-rockers.

“The reasons for this behavior were also the same in both studies,” Kirkman says. “Managers perceived employees who used challenging voice as threats to their leadership. On the other hand, leaders perceived the use of supportive voice as an indication that the employee shared the manager’s goals.”

However, the researchers did find one exception.

“In both studies, we found leaders were not threatened by challenging voice if an employee also exhibited high levels of helpful behavior,” Kirkman says. “If an employee was willing to buckle down and put in the work when the chips were down, such as helping leaders with heavy workloads, leaders were not threatened when that employee highlighted problems or raised concerns. High levels of helpful behavior didn’t influence the effects of supportive voice on how much leaders empowered their followers.”

There are two take-away messages here.

“For leaders, be conscious of the benefits that stem from empowering employees – and consider that not empowering people who challenge the status quo may adversely affect your bottom line,” says Kirkman.

“For employees, the message here is not that you shouldn’t speak out about potential concerns. Instead, the message is that you also need to exhibit helpful behavior, which will put you in a position to raise those concerns without fear of blowback.”

The paper, “Why Do Bootlickers Get Empowered More Than Boat-Rockers? The Effects of Voice and Helping on Empowering Leadership Through Threat and Goal Congruence Perceptions,” is published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Corresponding authors of the paper are Troy Smith, an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma, and Pengcheng Zhang, an associate professor at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology. The paper was co-authored by Tobias Dennerlein, an assistant professor at Purdue University; and by Stephen Courtright, professor of management at Texas A&M University.

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