In addition, the extant research focuses on the direct effect of a single leader—usually an immediate supervisor—or on the indirect
effect of top managers, via an organization's climate or structure, on employee voice behavior , without
considering the influence of the leader constellation (i.e., an employee's immediate supervisor and one or more skip-level leaders).
Skip-level leaders refer to leaders above the focal employee's immediate supervisor in the organization's formal chain of command
. Sometimes it is only skip-level leaders who have the authority and power to solve important problems or
to make crucial resource decisions that affect employees two or more levels below them . Therefore, it is
very important to understand how employees think about voice in complex organizations from the perspective of skip-level leaders.
Detert and Treviño call for an investigation of cross-level leadership influences or the cascading-down effects of skip-level
leaders. In response to this call, the current research examines the cascading effect of higher-level manager authoritarian
leadership (i.e., its indirect influence via lower-level supervisor authoritarian leadership), along with the direct influence of
immediate supervisor authoritarian leadership on employee voice behavior