Abstract: As a guideline deeply rooted in Chinese employees, silence exists in almost all the organizations in Chinese context. However, there is little research examining the leadership between leadership and employee silence. Based on evolutionary psychological theory and person-context interaction theory, this research built a theoretical model containing authentic leadership, psychological safety, extraversion, conscientiousness, and employee silence. According to evolutionary psychological perspective, the specific psychological mechanisms that people react in different situations are derived from the evolutionary process. The mechanisms that help human survive and evolve are preserved by natural selection. When people are faced with insecurity and threat, the defense mechanism is automatically triggered, managing to escape or avoid this threatened situation; on the other hand, when people encounter comfortable situations, the psychological safety will emerge instead. Based on this theoretical argument, we contend that psychology safety serves as the mediating mechanism between authentic leadership and employees’ silence behavior. Moreover, person-context interaction theory holds that individual characteristics will work together with contextual factors to influence individual behavior. As a result, only when individual characteristics and situational factors are both investigated can we fully reveal the causes of individual behaviors. We therefore propose the moderating roles of employees’ extraversion and conscientiousness between psychological safety and employees’ silence behavior, as well as among the mediating mechanism psychological safety plays. In order to identify these hypotheses, we investigated 222 employees in a large state-owned enterprise group in Henan Province to conduct the empirical study. A sixteen-item scale originally developed by Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing and Peterson (2008) was used to measure authentic leadership, a three-item scale developed by Detert and Burris (2007) was used to measure psychological safety, a six-item scale developed by Wong, Peng, Shi and Mao (2011) was used to measure extraversion, a six-item scale developed by Wong, Peng, Shi and Mao (2011) was used to measure conscientiousness, while a five-item scale developed by Tangirala and Ramanujam (2008) was used to measure employees’ silence behavior. The results showed that: (1) authentic leadership has a significantly negative impact on employee silence; (2) psychological safety mediates the relationship between authentic leadership and employee silence; (3) when employees’ extraversion and conscientiousness are higher, the negative relationship between psychological safety and employee silence will be stronger; (4) when employees’ extraversion and conscientiousness are higher, the mediating effect psychological safety plays between authentic leadership and employee silence will be stronger as well. In the end, we discussed the theoretical implication of this study and future research directions. The current study contributes to the literature in three important ways. First, it verified the effectiveness of authentic leadership in inhibiting employees’ silence behaviors in Chinese context. Second, we introduced followers’ psychological safety as an important mechanism between authentic leadership and subordinates’ silence behaviors, which help open the “black box” of authentic leadership. Finally, in line with person-context interaction theory, we also demonstrated the moderating role of extraversion and conscientiousness both between psychological safety and employees’ silence behavior, and among the mediating mechanism psychological safety plays.

Key words: authentic leadership, psychological safety, extraversion, conscientiousness, silence

摘要： 本文以进化心理学理论和个体-情景交互理论为基础，并以河南省一家国营企业的222名员工为样本，检验了真诚型领导行为抑制员工沉默行为的影响模型。研究结果表明：真诚型领导行为对员工沉默行为具有显著的负向影响；员工的心理安全感在真诚型领导行为和员工沉默行为之间起着中介作用；员工的外向性和责任感越高，心理安全感与员工沉默行为之间的负向联系的就越强，同时心理安全感的中介效应也越强。本文最后探讨了研究的理论和实践意义以及未来的研究方向。

关键词: 真诚型领导, 心理安全感, 外向性, 责任感, 沉默行为