Psychological Science ›› 2018, Vol. ›› Issue (4): 942-948.

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The Curvilinear Effect of Abusive Supervision on Voice: The Moderation of Value And Gender

1,   

  • Received:2017-06-28 Revised:2018-04-16 Online:2018-07-20 Published:2018-07-20

辱虐管理对建言影响的曲线效应:价值观和性别的调节作用

朱金强1,李海2   

  1. 1. 中央民族大学管理学院
    2. 北京师范大学 经济与工商管理学院
  • 通讯作者: 李海

Abstract: The environment organizations face is becoming increasingly dynamic, complicated and competitive. In this situation, managers by themselves have been unable to solve all the problems organizations have faced. Therefore, it is very important for the survival and development of organizations to make the best of employees’ wisdom and to encourage them to actively participate in management. An employee’s voice is a source of organizational innovative ideas and is helpful to maintain and promote organizational competitiveness, and it has been taken into account by more and more scholars and managers. Organizational researchers have devoted great attention to uncovering factors that influence employee’s voice. Many studies showed that leaders’ behavior is an important influence factor of employee’s voice behavior. For example, transformational leadership, authentic leadership and authorization can promote employees’ voice behavior. However, in practice, leaders’ abusive supervision is far more prevalent than their constructive behaviors, and the forms of abusive supervision are varied, damaging the interests of both employees and organizations (Sun and Ling, 2010). But, extant research mainly focuses on the linear effect of abusive supervision on voice, yet surprisingly little is known of the curvilinear effect. Based on activation theory, this study built and tested the curvilinear effect model of abusive supervision and voice. And the paper also tested the role of value and gender. The questionnaires, which were collected for a short-term training class in batches, were delivered and completed on the spot. We collected 290 questionnaires in total, and 249 valid questionnaires were ultimately included in this study, and the valid rate was 85.86%. The participants were drawn from several industries in Beijing, Inner Mongolia and Shanghai, including banking, electronics, real estate and so on. Among our sample, females account for 49.40%. Participants with a high school diploma and below account for 2.00%, participants with some college education account for 16.10%, participants with a bachelor’s degree account for 65.100%, participants with a graduate degree account for 14.50% and others are not represented. In the sample, 63.90% are married. The average age of participants is 32.20 (SD=7.09), and the average organizational tenure is 6.93 years (SD=7.00). We used SPSS22.0 and Mplus6.12 to analyze the data. First, we assessed the discriminant validity of the key variables through a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and examined the common method variance. Afterwards, we used hierarchy regression to test our hypotheses. Results showed that abusive supervision had a curvilinear relationship (inverted U-shaped) with voice. Moderate abusive supervision increased employees’ voice behavior. A lack of abusive supervision or presence of highly abusive supervision can cause decrements in employees’ voice. Gender moderated this curvilinear relationship. The relationship between abusive supervision and voice is stronger for male than female. The main theoretical contribution of our study is that the present study empirically found the curvilinear relationship between abusive supervision and voice, which enriched our understanding of the relationship between abusive supervision and voice. The other contribution is that we determined the moderation effect of gender. This enriched our knowledge of boundary conditions about abusive supervision and voice. In practice, measures should be taken to reduce abusive supervision but not zero abusive supervision to make best of advantages of abusive supervision. The key is to master the rule of “degree”. Secondly, leader should notice that not a leadership style suitable for all employees. Employee’s personal characteristic could also affect abusive supervision’s leadership effectiveness. Leaders need to use different abusive supervision for male and female employees.

Key words: abusive supervision, voice, value, gender, curvilinear effect

摘要: 现有研究主要探究领导风格对员工行为影响的直线效应,而对两者之间的曲线关系研究不足。基于激活理论,实证检验了辱虐管理与员工建言行为的曲线关系。研究结果表明辱虐管理对员工建言行为具有倒U型的影响,即上级主管辱虐不足或过度都不利于员工建言行为,只有适度的辱虐才能最有效地激发员工建言,性别调节了上述关系。这一研究发现表明适度的辱虐管理能够给组织带来积极效果,深化了人们对辱虐管理与员工建言关系的认识。

关键词: 辱虐管理, 建言, 价值观, 性别, 曲线