Abstract: As one representative kind of extra-role and challenging-promotive discretionary behavior, employees’ voice behaviors are valuable for employees themselves and the organization as a whole, especially in the complex economic society in the modern times. Nowadays, there are multitudes of scholars who had paid more attention to this important organizational phenomenon, and explored the formation mechanisms under this behavior preliminarily, in varieties of perspectives. Although these findings were inspiring, the cognitive decision-making processes underlying the behavioral engagement had remained relatively unexplored. Since Chiaburu et al.(2008) had first mentioned about this topic, and assumed an initial framework explaining discretionary behaviors including voice in particular using cognitive processes model, there were few scholars met this. This study attempted to fill this gap.
On the foundations of the Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1986) and Conservation of Resources Theory (Hobfoll, 2002), after inducing and clarifying the definition of voice efficacy, this study explored the role that voice efficacy played in the cognitive mechanism of voice behavior. The research was consisted of two sub-studies which sampled from private-firm employees and joint-venture employees in Yangtze Delta area of China. Study 1, according to the advice of Kish-gephart et al.(2009), 26 random samples of employees were interviewed to collect critical incidents of voice efficacy, and 14 items were collected. Then a questionnaire was made up of based on this 14 items. After the data survey, 3 items were deleted by item analysis procedure. Then, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted with 188 samples, the results showed that voice efficacy was one-dimension construct containing 7 optimal items. The results of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with the other 188 samples further supported this construct.
Study 2 probed the effects of voice efficacy in the formaiton mechanism of employee voice behavior. Based on 401 employee-supervisor matched samples, the results indicated that, general self-efficacy was positively related to voice behavior. In addition, voice efficacy mediated the positive relationship between general self-efficacy and voice behavior. Besides, the study also found that, under the condition of high job availability employee will conduct more voice behaviors. But job availability negatively moderated the positive relationship between voice efficacy and voice behavior. This outcome corroborated what conservation of Resources Theory purported, namely, resources are particularly salient in the context of loss (Hobfoll, 2002). The results of study 2 also supported the construct validity of what study 1 found, namely, voice efficacy.
The implications, limitaions and future orientations of the study were discussed as well.

Key words: voice efficacy, voice behavior, general self-efficacy, social cognitive theory, conservation of resources theory, job availability