Back to Vol. 40, No. 2, 2026
Vol. 40, No. 2, 2026

Behavior leading to influence: The differential impact of voice behavior and helping behavior on individual influence

Title

Behavior leading to influence: The differential impact of voice behavior and helping behavior on individual influence

Author

MA Guimei; YUAN Mingyue; MA Bing; ZHU Xianru

Abstract

In a dynamic and ever-changing environment, teams have become an effective unit of organizational operation, and organizations are increasingly relying on teams to complete work and deal with problems. In the teamwork mode, the interdependence of individual tasks is strengthened, and individuals usually need to mobilize other team members to collaborate and complete tasks. Therefore, individual influence has become one of the important issues in the research of organizational behavior. Previous studies have shown that individual influence not only affects individual attitudes and behaviors, but also plays a positive role in the effectiveness of team management and performance. Although some progress has been made in the study of individual influence, it mainly focuses on the individual’s influence on tasks, lacking independent measurement scales. This is not only failing to fully reflect the essence of individual influence but may also lead to inconsistent research conclusions. Recently, some scholars have proposed the concept of interpersonal influence; however, there is scarce empirical research on it, and there is even less integration with existing task influence. Based on the framework of social cognitive basic dimensions, people usually evaluate others from two aspects: the task function of goal realization and the social function of relationship maintenance, which is especially pronounced in the cultural context of Chinese interpersonal relationships. It is necessary to supplement the individual influence of the interpersonal affective dimension. Therefore, this study combines the in-depth interview and open-ended survey to divide personal influence into task influence and interpersonal influence exploratively, and empirically investigates the mechanisms underlying the differentiation of these two types of influence. Based on Grounded Theory, this study conducted text analysis on 18 in-depth interview materials and 74 open-ended survey questionnaires. On the basis of the universal dimensions of social cognition, individual influence can be divided into two dimensions: task influence and interpersonal influence. Based on the description of existing relevant scale items, key language stems are encoded by qualitative data, and the definition of two types of influence, the study obtained an initial individual influence scale. 361 valid questionnaire data were divided into two groups for exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. The discriminant validity between individual influence and related variables such as workplace status, personal power, and popularity was also tested. Finally, a measurement scale with two dimensions and nine items were formed. Using 322 paired peer-review data from 51 teams, the study explored the impact of voice behavior and helping behavior on individual influence. The results show that: 1)Voice behavior is positively related to task influence; and the advice network centrality mediates the relationship between voice behavior and task influence; 2)Helping behavior is positively related to interpersonal influence; and the friendship network centrality mediates the relationship between helping behavior and interpersonal influence; 3)Gender not only significantly moderates the relationship between two forms of organizational citizenship behavior and two types of social network centrality, but also moderates the mediating effect of two types of social network centrality between two forms of organizational citizenship behavior and the corresponding influence. Specifically, when the individual is male, the mediating effect of advice network centrality between voice behavior and task influence is stronger. On the contrary, when the individual is female, the mediating effect of friendship network centrality between helping behavior and interpersonal influence is stronger. This study makes several contributions to the existing research as follows: 1) Based on the framework of social cognition basic dimensions, this paper divides individual influence into two dimensions: task influence and interpersonal influence, and revises the measurement scale, which can promote the connotation development of individual influence and provide the foundation for future empirical research. 2) This paper constructs and verifies the differential effects of voice behavior and helping behavior on the two dimensions of individual influence, which can enrich the research on the results of voice behavior and helping behavior, and reveal the behavioral driving factors of individual influence from the task perspective and interpersonal perspective.

Keywords

Voice behavior; Helping behavior; Individual influence; Social network centrality; Gender

Issue

Vol. 40, No. 2, 2026

References