Guided by social exchange theory, this study examines whether and how authoritarian leadership influences employees' promotive and prohibitive voice behaviors in the service sector by investigating the mediating role of self-leadership and the moderating role of procedural justice.
A three-wave longitudinal multilevel design was employed. Data were collected from 373 frontline employees nested within 38 service organizations over a six-month period to test the proposed hypotheses.
The results reveal that authoritarian leadership negatively affects both promotive and prohibitive voice through self-leadership. Moreover, procedural justice paradoxically strengthens the negative relationship between authoritarian leadership and self-leadership, consistent with expectancy violation: high procedural justice raises employees' expectations, which authoritarian leadership then violates.
By identifying self-leadership as a mediator and procedural justice as a moderator, this study extends the application of social exchange theory and offers practical insights for reducing employee silence and improving service quality.
