Abstract: The firm’s innovation depends on employees’ initiative and creativity. As so, the study of employee voice behavior becomes increasingly important recently. Employee voice behavior is a kind of constructive, change-oriented communicating behavior which intends to improve the workground. Compared with the prevalence, the Chinese indigenous study of voice behavior is much scarcer. The fill in this gap, this research tries to explore the indigenous contruct of Chinese employee voice behavior. In addition, the relationship of the thinking style of Chinese people, i.e., Zhongyong and employee voice behavior is attempted to test to prove the discriminate validity of the contruct of Chinese employee voice behavior.
The research was consisted of two sub-studies which sampled from private firms employees and joint ventures employees in Yangtze Delta Area. Study 1 was conducted to explore the Chinese indigenous construct of voice behavior. Firstly, 30 random samples of employees were interviewed to collect critical incidents of voice behaviors. And then the questionnaire items were made up of based on the incidents. Secondly, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted with 159 samples. And two factors were extracted which the authors named it overall-oriented voice and self-centered voice respectively. The results of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with another 159 samples further supported the two-factor construct.
The relationship of Zhongyong thinking style and employee voice behavior, and the moderating effect of empowerment between this relation, were tested in study 2 which was based on 278 employee-colleague matched samples. Hierachical regression analysis showed that, Zhongyong was unrelated to holistic voice behavior, but it was positively related to overall-oriented voice, and negatively related to self-centered voice. These results offered a good discriminate validity of the two-dimension contruct of Chinese employee voice behavior. Moreover, employees’ perception of empowerment moderated the relationship between Zhongyong and the two dimensions of voice behavior.

Key words: Chinese context, voice behavior, overall-oriented voice, self-centered voice, Zhongyong, empowerment