Strategic human resource management is a mode of planning human resource deployment and activities, which aims to promote the organizations to achieve the goals. As a result, strategic human resource adopts systematic viewpoints to test the effects of a series of human resource practices. By this method, the view of strategic human resource management research and the view of traditional human resource function could be well-distinguished (Takeuchi et al., 2010). In the research on strategic human resource management, the concept of HPHRPs has evolved to be a core structure, including the degree to which enterprises invest in attracting, selecting, managing, and retaining the best human capital. At present, under the condition of high demand and competition for employees and management talents, more and more attention has been paid to the potential benefits of employing HPHRPs as an approach to maximize the competitive advantages of enterprises. HPHRPs refer to the combination of a series of separate but closely related human resource management practices, including comprehensive recruitment and selection, widely participated training opportunities, and fully motivated salary system. This series of human resource practices collectively form human resources “bundles,” which aims to improve the performance and the competitiveness of the company via enhancing employees’ abilities, attitudes, and motivations (Chadwick and Li, 2019).

Voice behavior, as an informal, autonomous, and upward communication of employees’ thoughts, solutions, or concerns about work-related problems, is a proactive work behavior with the aim of improving the current situation (Jia et al., 2020). Employees’ voice behavior is positively correlated with the expected results, such as personal work performance and organizational effectiveness (Frazier and Bowler, 2015).

Social identity theory illustrates that individuals possess a series of open identities, including personal, organizational, and social identities (Tajfel and Turner, 1979). Each identity reflects one’s sense of self-worth and self-esteem, which in turn act as the basis of cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes. When employees realize that they are a member of the organization, they will give positive assessments and are willing to engage in behaviors that are beneficial to the organization (e.g., voice behavior), even if these behaviors are risky and challenging (Hu and Jiang, 2016). Employees’ perception of the care from the organization lies on the related policies, human resource management practices, as well as the treatment they have previously experienced in the organization. HPHRPs could benefit employees by presenting a fair and open competitive environment, providing opportunities to actively participate in decision-making, and helping them perfect their career planning. Supportive human resource management practices could be regarded as an indication that the organization takes care of its employees. These employees who feel the organization’s care emphasize the common interests, collective welfare, and common goals which inspire the employees to generate identification with the organization. Therefore, it may stimulate employees to actively voice in order to give feedback (Zhu and Akhtar, 2017). Based on the abovementioned statements, the following hypothesis was proposed:

With the growing concern for the concept of organizational identification in the field of organizational management, the concept of employees’ perceived insider status has been the research focus by researchers and practitioners. Perceived insider status refers to the extent to which employees regard themselves as a member of a specific organization (Stamper and Masterson, 2002; Li et al., 2018). Although employees’ cognition of the employee-organization relationship was involved in many dimensions, perceived insider status focuses on the degree of employees’ perceived ownership of the organization, which makes up a part of personal social identity (Armstrongstassen and Schlosser, 2011). In reality, existing in the organization and perceived insider identity are two completely different concepts, indicating that employees who are traditionally regarded as “outsiders” by other organization members due to their status (e.g., part-time workers and ethnic minorities) may also feel that they are part of organizational communication. On the contrary, individuals who are currently included in the organization (e.g., full-time employees) may not feel that they are the insiders. It can be learned that employees’ perceived insider status could be changed. Research indicated that both the organizational level [e.g., perceiving the organizational supports (Lapalme et al., 2009) and caring ethical atmosphere (Tan and Liu, 2017)] and the group level [e.g., supports from the leader (Liu et al., 2018) and perceived supports from colleagues (Lapalme et al., 2009)] would be conducive to cultivating employees’ cognition of the identity of insiders.

Social identity theory holds the viewpoint that everyone should seek opportunities to evaluate themselves positively in order to form the qualification of individual group membership or social identity. Social identity contains three parts, namely, social classification, social comparison, and active distinction. Social identity is considered as a kind of cognitive tool, by which, people tend to distinguish and classify the subjects in the surrounding environment, thereby better creating and defining their own positions in the society and making more positive comments on the group that they belong to. Supportive HPHRPs from the organizational level would be beneficial to cultivate employees’ perception of the insiders’ status. Those employees are more likely to behave like citizens and contribute to the success of their teams when they feel that they are well-valued in the work environment (Ma et al., 2019). The reason is that they regard themselves as ingredients of the organization, and they will pay additional attention to the issues to be improved and put forward corresponding constructive suggestions (Chen et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2018). Based on the abovementioned statement, the following hypothesis was put forth:

Self-efficacy, an important concept in the field of self-cognition, reflects the confidence in one’s ability to achieve the set goals and represents the degree of individual persistence, effort, and willingness (Bandura, 1986; Koc, 2021). Self-efficacy has the characteristic of domain specificity, and it can be divided into general efficacy and self-efficacy for a specific field (e.g., innovation efficacy and voice efficacy) based on the differences of tasks among different domains. Kish-Gephart et al. (2009) came up with the concept of voice efficacy from the perspective of internal motivation when studying why employees remain silent (Kish-Gephart et al., 2009). The voice efficacy originates from self-efficacy, which is the belief of employees on whether their voice behaviors can be successful, especially whether employees firmly believe that their suggestions will be adopted by the supervisors and contributed to the improvement of organizational performance.

Employees with a relatively stronger sense of voice efficacy always possess strong self-confidence in their behaviors and have strong self-control over things, so they are willing to take the initiative to do their work (Tian and Huang, 2014). After perceiving the sense of “master” of insider identity, employees with a relatively strong sense of voice efficacy will be more eager to voice, so as to improve the disadvantages and deficiencies existing in the current status. Moreover, they will not remain silent because of the decline of their opinions or the ridicules from their workmates. The reason is that they are full of confidence in their voice behaviors, believe that their opinions are constructive and beneficial, and are able to well handle complicated interpersonal conflicts. In contrast, employees with a relatively low sense of voice efficacy are not confident in their suggestions, and they are afraid that their suggestions will be useless or bring troubles to the organizations. Even if they feel that they are part of the organization, they hold extremely resistant or hesitant attitudes to voice behaviors. Based on the abovementioned statements, the following hypothesis was put forth:

Furthermore, voice behaviors act as a kind of driving force to make organizational performance realize the efficiency of 1 + 1 > 2. Unfortunately, employees tend to hide their personal thoughts in practical work for their own interests (Zhu and Akhtar, 2017). Not only HPHRPs include specific management measures, but they also pay more attention to the personal feelings of the employees and the formation of a good working atmosphere (Muduli, 2015). With the help of HPHRPs, employees could acquire a fair competitive environment, extensive opportunities to participate in decision-making, reasonable promotion channels, and so on. Individuals with a high sense of voice efficacy would like to trust that their voices could bring fair returns to the organization rather than prejudices or punishments. Besides, after perceiving the created friendly atmosphere, they are more willing to regard themselves as an inside member and make contributions to the development and progress of their organizations. Based on the abovementioned statement, the following hypothesis was put forth:

According to the above analysis, a multilevel moderated mediation theoretical model was proposed, i.e., the HPHRPs at the organizational level affect the employees’ voice behavior by influencing the perceived insider status. This demonstrates that the perceived insider status plays a mediating role between HPHRPs and the employees’ voice behavior. In the meanwhile, the sense of voice efficacy plays a moderated role in the second stage and the whole mediating process. The overall research model is shown in Figure 1.

This study investigated the enterprises in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Guangzhou, and other places, involving enterprises with attributes, such as production, operation, and construction. To avoid the homologous deviation, the supervisor-employee paired method was employed to collect data, and two questionnaires were also designed. Questionnaire 1 was filled by the employees, including the perception of HPHRPs, perceived insider status, and voice efficacy; Questionnaire 2 was filled by the employees’ direct supervisors, in which the employees’ voice behavior was evaluated by the supervisors. The two sets of questionnaires were numbered and recovered at the same time. In this study, a total of 1,500 paired questionnaires were issued to 60 companies, and finally, feedback from 51 companies was received; 1,178 paired questionnaires were recovered, with a recovery rate of 78.53%.

As can be observed from the investigated employee samples, there were 53.74% of men and 46.26% of women. In the aspect of age, those who aged below 25 years accounted for 20.29%, those who aged in the range of 26–30 years accounted for 21.48%, those who aged in the range of 31–35 years accounted for 20.63%, those who aged in the range of 36–40 years accounted for 16.64%, those who aged in the range of 41–45 years accounted for 13.50%, and those who aged more than 46 years accounted for 0.47%. In the aspect of marital status, married couples accounted for 60.02%, unmarried people accounted for 35.82%, and others accounted for 4.16%. As for the educational background, 23.17% of the investigated employees were below undergraduates, 49.66% of them were undergraduates, 25.72% were post-graduates, and 1.44% were above post-graduates. Regarding seniority in working, 15.79% of the surveyed samples had an experience within 3 years, 38.62% had 3–6 years of experience, 34.04% had 6–9 years of experience, and 11.55% had an experience of more than 10 years.

In this study, the research scale developed by well-known foreign scholars was adopted. After the translation-back translation process of two PhDs in organizational behavior and the calibration by a professor in organizational behavior, the items with unclear semantics and ambiguities were conducted localized modification, so as to ensure that all the items in the scale could be understood by the survey participants. The five-point Likert-type scale was used in this study (one represented completely disagree and five represented fully agree).

In this study, the HPHRPs are an organization-level variable measured by individual units, and it is necessary to aggregate the data at the individual level to the team level. Therefore, the intragroup reliability (r_wg) and intragroup correlation coefficient (ICC) were employed to check the compatibility of data aggregation. The results indicated that the intragroup consistency r_wg of HPHRPs was 0.91 (>0.70), the intragroup explanatory variance ratio ICC(1) was 0.08 (>0.05), and the average score reliability of group members ICC(2) was 0.73 (>0.70); all the values reached the acceptable range. The results indicated that the organizational level of HPHRPs aggregated from the individual level was appropriate.

The mean, variance, and correlation coefficient of the four main variables were analyzed using SPSS 22.0 software, and the results are shown in Table 1. It can be seen from the table that HPHRPs were significantly correlated with perceived insider status (r = 0.22, p < 0.01) and voice behavior (r = 0.50, p < 0.01), and perceived insider status was significantly correlated with voice behavior (r = 0.41, p < 0.01). The obtained results preliminarily supported our research expectations.

To test the discriminant validity among the variables and the fitting degree of the model, Mplus 7.0 software was used to perform confirmatory factor analysis on the four main variables, and the results are listed in Table 2. The results illustrated that the fitting degree of each indicator of the four-factor model was obviously better than that of other models (χ²/df = 2.68, Tucker Lewis index (TLI) = 0.91, comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.92, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.06, standardized root mean square residual (SRMR) = 0.06), which demonstrated that the four main variables possessed good discriminant validity.

Since a multilevel model was constructed in this study, HPHRPs belong to the organizational level variable, while perceived insider status, voice efficiency, and voice behavior belong to individual-level variables. Therefore, Mplus 7.0 software was employed to test the direct and indirect relationships among the variables using the hierarchical linear modeling technology.

The presented research aims to explore the impact of HPHRPs at the organizational level on employees’ voice behavior at the individual level and, in particular, explore the mediating role of perceived insider status and the moderating role of voice efficacy based on social identity theory. Based on the paired questionnaire survey of 1,178 supervisors and employees from 51 companies, the following conclusions could be drawn.

(1) High performance human resource practices had a positive impact on employees’ voice behavior; (2) the perceived insider status acted as a mediating role between HPHRPs and voice behaviors, i.e., HPHRPs promoted the voice behavior by enhancing employees’ perceived insider status; (3) the voice efficacy played a moderating role between the perceived insider status and voice behaviors, namely, the higher the individual’s voice efficacy was, the better the promotion effect of perceived insider status on voice behavior would be; and (4) voice efficacy played a moderating role in the relationship of “HPHRPs-perceived insider status-voice behavior,” i.e., compared with the individuals with low voice efficacy, those with high voice efficacy were more likely to generate perceived insider status under the influence of HPHRPs, so they were more inclined to produce voice behavior.

The theoretical contributions of the presented work were listed as follows. On the one hand, a macro factor influencing voice behavior was reported. Scholars in the field of organizational behavior have discovered many personal and organizational factors affecting voice behavior, such as personality, emotion, leadership, and atmosphere perception. In response to the recent calls to consider relatively macro-organizational or management factors to understand employees’ voices (Mowbray et al., 2015), HPHRPs, a representative area of strategic human resource practices, were introduced into the research on individual voice behavior, so as to establish a connection between the field of human resources and the field of organizational behavior (Liu et al., 2017).

On the other hand, the mediating mechanism of HPHRPs affecting voice behavior was proposed from the perspective of social identity. Social exchange theory was mostly adopted in the research on HPHRPs and employees’ initiative behaviors (Miao et al., 2013; Hu and Jiang, 2016). Consistent with these reported outcomes, our study also demonstrated the promotion effect of HPHRPs on employees’ voice behavior. In addition, our study indicated that the perceived insider status could mediate the relationship between HPHRPs and voice behavior from the perspective of social identity. In other words, the integrated HPHRPs could indirectly influence the employees’ voice behavior by enhancing the perceived insider status. Therefore, the influence process of human resource practices on employees’ behavior was not only a social exchange but also a process of self-categorization and self-identification. In the meanwhile, the support of self-voice belief was indispensable when employees chose their own voice tasks. As a proactive behavior, the occurrence of voice required a certain internal push force, which came not only from the reciprocal emotional factors but also from self-identity recognition and self-confidence level assessment. This viewpoint has deepened people’s understanding of the internal effect mechanism of organizational macro factors and employees’ behavior.

This study is of important practical significance. First, the organizations should be aware that employee-oriented integrated human resource practices could induce positive responses from the employees. Our results demonstrated that HPHRPs could be regarded as a kind of support to employees and possessed the potential to enhance employees’ voice behavior. For employees, expressing opinions on organizational improvement would be beneficial to formulate and implement human resource practices that could promote personal development (e.g., training, counseling, and other professional development plans) and meet their family needs (e.g., family care plans and other procedures for resolving work-life conflicts).

Second, our findings illustrated that perceived insider status played an important role in transmitting the function of organizational human resource practices to promote voice behavior. This evidence suggested that the managers should think highly of the establishment of employees’ personal identity in the organization, which can be operated through a series of employee-oriented HPHRPs. More importantly, the organization should aware that the voice behavior was risky. For those employees who dared to speak frankly and bluntly, the organization should convey to employees a belief that the value of each employee would be valued and each employee was the “master” of the organization. This sense of recognition was enough for them to bear the risk of voice.

Third, to maximize the effectiveness of HPHRPs, individual differences among employees should be taken into consideration. Our results indicated that voice efficacy significantly distinguished the effectiveness of HPHRPs in establishing perceived insider status and further enhancing voice behaviors. When formulating human resource management of the enterprise, the employees’ voice efficacy should be assessed to evaluate the results caused by these practices. This strategy is conducive to helping the organizations adjust management practices to cater to different groups of employees.

Although the proposed hypotheses have been supported to some extent, there are still some limitations in this study. On the one hand, it is related to the cross-sectional design in this study. HPHRPs could influence employees’ voice behavior through perceived insider status, but it takes time for this influence to develop. Moreover, other conclusions could not be excluded even if our research results were consistent with the theoretical hypotheses, and the multisource data (e.g., upper and lower binary paired data) were employed to solve the problems caused by the common method variance to a certain extent (Ye et al., 2020). Therefore, the longitudinal design is recommended in the future study, which may better determine the causal basis of the investigated correlations.

On the other hand, the recent studies regarding voice behavior could be classified into two types, namely, promotional voice and inhibitory voice. The current research focused on voice behavior in a single dimension, while Liang et al. (2012) reported that the risk of inhibitory voice was greater (Liang et al., 2012). Would it have a stronger relationship with management support? This issue is worthwhile to clarify, so as to study whether HPHRPs would exert different effects on promotional or inhibitory voices.