The Influence of Paternalistic leadership on Employees Voice in China's SMEs: the Mediating Role of Employee Trust and the Moderating Role of Zhongyong Thinking

This paper takes SMEs in China as the research object and developed a conceptual model and established hypotheses based on analyzing the existing literature from the perspective of relevant theories of management.The aim of the study is to explore the influence of paternalistic leadership on employees voice by taking employee trust as the mediating variable and Zhongyong thinking as the moderating variable.By analyzing the data of 400 valid questionnaires issued by employees of SMEs in China.The results further verified the positive impact of paternalistic leadership on employee voice behavior, and employee trust positively influences employee voice, Zhongyong thinking has a significant positive moderating effect on employee trust and employee voice, and it was found that the moderating effect increases with a higher degree of Zhongyong thinking.Which contributed to the research in related fields, and put forward reasonable suggestions for encouraging employees' voice behavior in SMEs: leadership styles should be adjusted to encourage the voice of employees; trust signals should be released to enhance employee trust; employees should be cultivated with high Zhongyong thinking; a good atmosphere and multi-channel counseling mechanism should be established.