Research Article
A Study on the Relationship between Abusive Supervision and Subordinates’ Resistance Behavior - focused on interactive justice & psychological contract -
Baewha Women's University
Seoul Women's University
Sogang University
Published: January 2011 · Vol. 40, No. 3 · pp. 831-857
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Abstract
Negative behavior from those in positions of leadership has been pointed out as an important variable in causing negative actions. These negative behaviors have been considered to be limited to certain kinds of people, and therefore it has been studied in the psychological aspect; however, unnecessary economic losses or reduced efficiency have been pointed out in the business management field. In the social exchange theory, employees who received unfair treatment from their supervisor tend to look for ways to get revenge or exhibit other negative behaviors. They may reduce their positive behaviors like organizational citizenship behaviors in order to avoid potential retaliation from the supervisor and instead exhibit deviant behavior to cause indirect damage to the supervisor with their attitude. Abusive supervision, which is the one of the types of negative behavior of a leader, tends to be a long-term problem, and empirical studies have been performed recently, but very few in Korea. Abusive supervision was defined as the employees’ view that their supervisor engages in unrelenting hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviour. This might include public criticism/ridicule, insulting behaviour/rudeness, breaking promises, silent treatment, invasion of privacy and so forth (not physical attacks). Previous research has found abusive supervision is related to lower satisfaction and commitment, higher work-family and family-work conflict and higher levels of stress-related problems. The purpose of this study is to determine the antecedents of abusive supervision and its effect on the resistance to such behavior by workers, and also to determine the mediating roles of abusive supervision between the antecedents and subordinates behaviors and to consider the moderating variables that can strengthen or weaken the relationship between the abusive supervision and employee behaviors. The detailed goals of this study can be specified as follows. The first objective is to find out the use of abusive supervision increases as the recognized interactive justice increases. Second, this study focuses on dividing the employee's behaviors into the categories of resistance in an organization and empirically determine how each behavior is related to the abusive supervision in order to determine the effect of the abusive supervision on employee behaviors. Third, this study aims to determine the psychological degree to which the employees recognize the psychological contract breach as a variable that can moderate the relationship between the abusive supervision and employee behaviors, and to analyze its moderating effects. Fourth, to determine the mediating role of the abusive supervision in the relationship between the antecedents that can cause the abusive supervision and the subordinates' organizational citizenship behaviors. For empirical study, a supervisor-employee(paired) survey was performed for the analysis,and a total of 466 surveys (233 Pairs) was used. Technical statistics, relationship analysis,and structural equation analysis were performed to verify the hypothesis. The following is a summery of the verification results. First, the use of abusive supervision increases as the recognized interactive justice increases. Second, in the relationships between the use of abusive supervision and employee’s dysfunction resistance, the resistance is positively correlated to the abusive supervision, but no significant statistic results were found for the relationship between the abusive supervision and employee’s constructive resistance. Third, the degree to which the employees recognize the psychological contract breach doesn’t have a role in moderating the relationship between the abusive supervision and employee’s organizational citizenship behavior as well as the constructive resistance. The employee’s psychological contract breach had a moderating effect on the relationship between the abusive supervision and employee's dysfunctional resistance; however, it doesn't match the study hypothesis which says that the relationship between the abusive supervision and employee’s dysfunctional resistance strengthens as the psychological contract breach increases; and therefore the hypothesis was rejected. Fourth, the abusive supervision was empirically verified to have a mediating effect between the organizational situational characteristics(interactive justice) and the employee’s dysfunctional resistance.
