Employee voice is critical to organizational survival, development and success. Being able to get high quality information from employees is the largest and most valuable asset for organizations. Although employee voice is an important contributor to organizational effectiveness, leaders’ responses to voice can be positive (e.g. voice-taking) or negative (e.g. voice rejection). And even compared with taking voice, leaders are more likely to reject voice. Voice is open to interpretation and different leaders can respond differently to voice event because of the personal subjective cognition. In order to better understand why and when leaders will reject voice, this paper constructs a motivated social cognitive model based on the perspective of motivated social cognitive framework, which can explain in detail how different motives related to psychological conservatism lead to voice rejection. Because voice rejection is a new research topic, there is no clear and definite expression about it at present. Therefore, this paper firstly explores the connotation of voice rejection from related literature of leaders’ responses to voice and feedback and defines voice rejection from the perspective of actor purpose. It refers to a kind of behavior that leaders express aversion to or resist voice in order to maintain self-esteem and authority. Subsequently, this paper reviews motivated social cognitive framework and constructs a motivated social cognitive model of voice rejection, which explains in detail the effects of epistemic motives (i.e. need for cognitive closure, need for cognitive structure and uncertainty avoidance), existential motives (i.e. threat to self-esteem, regulatory focus and defensive pessimism) and ideological motives (i.e. social dominance orientation, interpersonal hierarchy expectations and authoritarianism) on voice rejection. And then, it discusses driving factors of the three kinds of motives from personality characteristics (i.e. managerial self-efficacy and openness to experience) and contextual factors (i.e. climate for inclusion and time pressure). Some propositions are proposed: epistemic motives, existential motives and ideological motives are positively related to voice rejection; managerial self-efficacy is negatively related to epistemic motives and existential motives, and the two kinds of motives mediate the relationship between managerial self-efficacy and voice rejection; openness to experience is negatively related to epistemic motives, existential motives and ideological motives, and the three kinds of motives mediate the relationship between openness to experience and voice rejection; climate for inclusion is negatively related to epistemic motives, existential motives and ideological motives, and the three kinds of motives mediate the relationship between climate for inclusion and voice rejection; time pressure is positively related to epistemic motives, existential motives and ideological motives, and the three kinds of motives mediate the relationship between time pressure and voice rejection. Finally, future research directions are discussed, such as exploring the mediating role of motivated cognitive factors in the relationships between personality characteristics, contextual factors and voice rejection through empirical study, discussing the effect of other motivated cognitive factors on voice rejection and the interaction effect of personality characteristics and contextual factors, and exploring antecedents of voice rejection from other theoretical perspectives.