A diary study on the relationship between prohibitive voice and work–life conflict: Examining affective and resource-depletion paths.

Employees' prohibitive voice is important for organizational success, as it may help to reduce or prevent current and future losses.However, expressing prohibitive voice involves social risks and may therefore incur personal costs for employees.Drawing on the approach-avoidance framework and the spillover hypothesis, this daily diary study examines the ways prohibitive voice can have a negative cross-domain effect on employees' nonwork lives by giving rise to work-life conflict.We propose an affective pathway (via anxiety) and a resource-based pathway (via ego depletion) as the mechanisms through which this effect may run.The final sample included 89 employees.Analyses were based on survey data from up to five consecutive workdays and three daily measures (k = 349).Results from a multilevel path model showed that employees' morning prohibitive voice was positively associated with anxiety and ego depletion in the afternoon.Ego depletion was further positively related to work-life conflict in the evening.Mediation analysis suggested that the effect of morning prohibitive voice reaches through to evening work-life conflict via a resource-depletion pathway.Overall, our findings indicate that prohibitive voice can interfere with employees' after-work lives by depleting their regulatory resources.