Beyond the Words: Prohibitive Voice, Supervisors’ Commitment Inferences, and Discretionary Supervisory Investment

Supervisors cannot directly observe how attached an employee feels to the organization; they infer it from what the employee does and says. Drawing on the Brunswik lens model of interpersonal judgment and implicit followership theory, this study asks whether supervisors treat the form of employees’ voice as a cue when inferring affective commitment, and whether supervisors’ own power distance orientation changes the weight placed on that cue. Three-wave, multisource data were collected from 413 matched employee–supervisor dyads in Ghana. Controlling for employee-reported affective commitment, co-occurring voice, supervisor-rated performance, dyadic tenure, and demographics, prohibitive voice showed a negative unique association with supervisors’ commitment inferences, whereas promotive voice showed a positive unique association. The prohibitive weight is a suppression effect: it is absent at the zero-order level and emerges only once co-occurring promotive voice is held constant. In turn, inferred commitment was positively associated with later employee-reported discretionary supervisory investment. Supervisor power distance orientation moderated the first stage, with prohibitive voice unrelated to inferred commitment among low-power-distance supervisors and strongly negative among high-power-distance supervisors. Supervisor power distance orientation therefore functioned as an individual-level boundary condition on the association between prohibitive voice and commitment judgments within a single national setting, rather than as a country-level cultural attribute.