Three essays on examining abusive supervision from the third party perspective

• Main Author: Feng, Zhiyu
• Other Authors: Fong Keng Highberger
• Format: Thesis-Doctor of Philosophy
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Business::Management::Organizational behavior
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/137228
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

A new line of research has recently adopted a third-party perspective on examining how witnessing the abusive supervision of coworkers (coworker abusive supervision) influences a third-party employee’s reactions toward coworkers. However, this work tends to see the third party as an objective and independent observer who is not involved in the perpetrator-victim abuse interaction. Given a third-party employee’s regular interactions with both the supervisor and coworkers in the workplace, it is of theoretical and practical importance to investigate how third-party employees are involved in the coworker abusive supervision encounter. In my first essay, integrating moral exclusion theory, social comparison theory, justice theory, and attribution theory, I propose a three-phase third party’s involvement model unraveling how a third-party employee can become involved as a non-independent bystander in the activation, appraisal, and response phases of coworker abusive supervision. My second and third essays build on the first essay by quantitatively testing parts of my proposed model. Specifically, in my second essay, I present and test a moderated sequential mediation model delineating how high performers (i.e., third-party employees) may indirectly impact coworker abusive supervision and when they are more likely to experience shame and ostracism from their coworkers for doing so. Analyses of multistage, multisource, and multilevel data consisting of 195 subordinates nested within 39 supervisors supported my model. A high performer’s relative task performance exerts a positive indirect effect on his/her feelings of shame through coworker abusive supervision. Further, group competition climate alleviates this indirect effect by weakening the positive relationship between coworker abusive supervision and high performer shame. Finally, high performer shame is positively related to perceptions of being ostracized by their coworkers. In my third essay, I test two competing explanations for a focal employee’s (i.e., a third-party employee’s) motivations to help coworkers who are abused: an altruistically motivated helping view versus an egoistically motivated helping view. According to the altruistically motivated helping view, employees who receive abusive supervision themselves would be better able to empathize with and affiliate with coworkers who are abused and, in turn, would be more inclined to help these abused coworkers in order to reduce their distress. By contrast, according to the egoistically motivated helping view, as employees’ preferential treatment compared to their abused coworkers results in their guilt and shame, employees who receive less abusive supervision themselves would more likely help coworkers who are abused to relieve their negative mood states. Two experiment studies provided support for the altruistically motivated helping view.