Psychology
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Browsing Psychology by Subject "abusive supervision"
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Item Expanding the Role of Power in Employees’ Interpretations of and Reactions to Leader Behaviors(University of Waterloo, 2021-04-13)Though research on the impact of leader behaviors is generally grounded in the notion that organizational leaders hold formal power over subordinate employees, this conceptualization overlooks the power that employees may experience in the workplace that does not stem from the formal organizational hierarchy. However, with a growing body of theory and research on the psychology of power and informal sources of organizational power, it is possible to broaden our understanding of the role of power in the leadership process. Across two essays, this dissertation explores how employee experiences of power shape their interpretations of and reactions to leader behaviors. Essay 1 considers the well-established connection between abusive supervision and employee supervisor-directed deviance. Though it is understood that engaging in supervisor-directed deviance is dependent on the supervisor-employee power differential, prior accounts of this reaction to abusive supervision have overlooked the role played by power embedded in employees’ informal social context. To address this gap, Essay 1 draws on power-dependence theory, the approach-inhibition theory of power, and uses a social network approach to explain the link between abusive supervision and supervisor-directed deviance. In doing so, a three-way interaction is proposed, in which the abuse-deviance relationship is impacted by two components of informal power: social network centrality and influence of subordinate employees. In particular, it is predicted that the relationship will be the strongest when subordinates have high social network centrality and high influence. This prediction was tested through the collection of full social network data, as well as employee self-report surveys. The results provide support for the notion that supervisor-directed deviance emerges most strongly as a consequence of abusive supervision for employees who wield informal power in their organization. Essay 2 concerns the construct of psychological empowerment, which is positioned in this essay as the cognitive manifestation of personal power in the workplace. While psychological empowerment is commonly framed as an outcome of leadership, Essay 2 builds on a growing body of work which demonstrates that the individual characteristics of employees can influence their ratings of leadership behaviors. A longitudinal crossed-lagged research design was employed over 9 months to determine the extent to which psychological empowerment predicts ratings of leadership, while controlling for reciprocal effects. Through an integration of psychological empowerment with the approach-inhibition theory of power, it was predicted that psychological empowerment would be positively associated with ratings of empowering leadership and negatively associated with ratings of abusive supervision. The findings support these predications and further provide evidence that the effect of psychological empowerment on ratings of empowering leadership is mediated by the experience of positive affect at work, an indicator of behavioral approach system activation. It is suggested that the findings generally support the account offered by the approach-inhibition theory of power on how psychological empowerment may impact one’s experience of leadership.Item License to Misbehave: Organizational Citizenship Behavior as a Moral License for Deviant Reactions to Abusive Supervision(University of Waterloo, 2014-04-29)Abusive supervision research has found that subordinates engage in deviance following abuse despite the negative consequences of doing so. Why do individuals engage in deviance despite the expected sanctions? To explain this relationship a model is proposed based on moral licensing theory wherein the relationship of abusive supervision and subsequent negative voluntary work behaviors will be moderated by the extent to which subordinates performed positive voluntary work behaviors. In Study 1, I demonstrate that high organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) as rated by subordinates’ significant others significantly increased the relationship between abusive supervision and organizational deviance, while the relationship was not significant at low levels of significant other rated OCB. In Study 2 I replicate and extend this finding using time-lagged data, finding that in the context of abusive supervision, OCB directed at the supervisor at day t significantly increased the incidence of counterproductive work behaviors directed at the supervisor and organization at day t + 1. Implications for moral licensing and abusive supervision research are discussed.Item Losing Your Calm or Losing Control: Two Paths to Retaliatory Deviance in Response to Abusive Supervision(University of Waterloo, 2013-09-03T19:38:25Z)Retaliation is a well-established response to abusive supervision. Leading edge research explains the occurrence of supervisor-directed retaliation through processes associated with the strength model of self-control (Baumeister, Vohs, & Tice, 2007). The present research builds on these ideas by considering the role of emotions in the retaliatory processes. 407 participants completed an online survey that included questionnaires measuring personality traits associated with self-control and emotional experiences. Findings indicate that a predisposition to negative emotional experiences predicts retaliatory behavior in response to abusive supervision, even for individuals with a high capacity for self-control. It is suggested that future research should determine whether emotion-driven retaliation is mediated by a desire for revenge.Item Responding to Abusive Supervision: Opposing Arguments for the Role of Social Class in Predicting Workplace Deviance(University of Waterloo, 2013-09-03T19:16:41Z)This research examined the effect of social class on the relationship between abusive supervision and workplace deviance. Within the social class literature we found conflicting theoretical arguments regarding the effect that social class would have on responses to abuse. To address this discordance we examined the effect of social class on responses to abusive supervision in four samples using multiple methods. Results confirmed that social class moderates the association between abusive supervision and workplace deviance. Specifically, the effect of abusive supervision on workplace deviance was stronger for higher social classes. In our laboratory research, the use of an abusive supervision prime and a subjective social class manipulation provided preliminary evidence for this effect. Our multi-wave field research provided evidence that these findings extend to actual employee behavior (i.e., interpersonal and organizational deviance). Implications for the abusive supervision literature are discussed.