Voice literature has been flourished for decades, but scant studies have directly examined how leaders respond emotionally to employee voice. Drawing on construal level theory and its descendent, the social distance theory of power, we theorize that promotive voice has a higher construal level than prohibitive voice. Based on the different construal level of the two voice types, we propose that promotive voice, compared with prohibitive voice, has an advantage in fitting the asymmetric social distance that arises from the asymmetric power dependence between subordinates and their leader, which results in leader’s positive emotions (i.e., increased gratitude and decreased disgust) and in turn enhances voice endorsement. In addition, as leader’s dependence on subordinates increases, such more balanced power dependence would make the social distance between the two parties more symmetric and consequently attenuate leader’s distancing tendency and weaken the advantage of promotive voice. Through four experiments (Study 1), we found that promotive voice would generally be construed at a higher level than prohibitive voice. We tested our research model in an additional experiment (Study 2) and found partial support. This research introduces a construal level perspective on employee voice behavior and enriches the literature on voice and construal fit from emotional mechanisms.
