Same Playbook, Safer Plays: Leader-Member Alignment and Employee Voice

This study examines how alignment in leader-member exchange (LMX)—the degree to which leaders and members share similar evaluations of their relationship—shapes employee voice, and identifies psychological safety as the mechanism through which it does so. Drawing on LMX and informed by role-based perspectives, we argue that alignment stabilizes everyday interactions and reduces the anticipated interpersonal cost of speaking up. Using multi-source, multi-wave data from 496 team members and 139 team leaders nested within 139 teams in South Korea, and modeling alignment with polynomial regression, we find that LMX alignment is positively associated with psychological safety; that this relationship is stronger when both parties view the relationship as high quality rather than low quality; and that psychological safety is lowest when leaders’ LMX ratings exceed members’—a difference of 0.65 points relative to the condition in which both parties are aligned on a high-quality relationship (on a five-point scale). Psychological safety, in turn, predicts voice and mediates the effect of alignment on speaking up. By positioning psychological safety as the pathway from dyadic alignment to voice, we show that leaders who overestimate relationship quality may inadvertently suppress the very communication they seek to encourage.