How to give voice for employee satisfaction. The mediation effect of LMX and distributive justice

This article is rooted in employee’s attitude literature which reveals the need for more
integrations. Specifically, the study examines the relationship between employee voice, defined
as any opportunity for employees to have a say in workplace, and overall satisfaction at work,
which refers to one’s job attitude reflecting an evaluative judgment one makes about one’s job
or job situation. These topics have received attention in the literature, but they are not jointly
studied in an extensive way, thus, this article offers some contributions to the existing
evidences. Based on Social Exchange Theory and Adam’s Equity Theory, we explore the
mechanism underlying the relationship between employee voice and job satisfaction focusing
on leader-member exchange (LMX) and distributive justice. The empirical analysis develops
around survey data collected among workers of manufacturing organizations. The hypotheses
are tested through the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences – SPSS – (v.24) named
PROCESS developed by Hayes (2017). This macro bases the mediation analysis on
bootstrapping which is used to generate an empirically derived representation of the sampling
distribution of the indirect effect. Findings show that employee voice positively and
significantly affects overall job satisfaction. Moreover, results indicate that employee voice has
a positive relationship with leader-member exchange (LMX) and distributive justice. The
mediation analysis reveals also that the direct effect of employee voice on overall satisfaction
is no more significant when the mediators are included in the regression. Specifically, observing
the indirect effect of every single mediator, LMX has an indirect effect on the investigated
relationship but distributive justice indirect effect is not significant.
These findings have important practical implications for organisations in terms of selection and
recruitment of managers that best fit not only the organizational values and objectives but also
in terms of supporting behaviours. This type of managerial attitude has an important impact on
social relationships and impact also the perceptions of fairness in the workplace, as the study
demonstrated it to be critical for job satisfaction. All these considerations, however, make it
essential for voice behaviour to be possible in the workplace and this can be facilitated by the
use of practice more or less formal which make employees able to express their opinions.