Rational or emotional? Prohibitive voice of outsourced employees in a time trajectory perspective

Abstract

Does outsourced employees' risk behavior depend more on rationality or emotion in temporary interorganizational project-based teams? Combining trust-related research and a time trajectory perspective, this study re-examines the relationship between trust and outsourced employees' prohibitive voice in interorganizational project-based teams. Two-wave survey data were collected from 286 outsourced employees and their supervisors across 52 interorganizational teams in China. Empirical results show that outsourced employees' prohibitive voice depends more on cognition-based trust than on affect-based trust. With project execution time increases, the promoting effect of affect-based trust on prohibitive voice shows an increase, while the impact of cognition-based trust demonstrated little variation. Moreover, outsourced employees' perceptions of leader-member exchange (LMX) differentiation mediates the moderating effect of project execution time on the relationship between affect-based trust and prohibitive voice. However, the mediated moderation effect is not significant for cognition-based trust. Theoretical and practical implications for project-based team management are discussed.