›› 2021, Vol. ›› Issue (1): 111-117.

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How Does Deep Acting Weaken the Negative Impact of Abusive Supervision on Employee Voice? A Method to Deal with Abuse

  

  • Received:2019-07-19 Revised:2020-01-15 Online:2021-01-20 Published:2021-01-20

应对辱虐,有计可施?深层调节如何降低辱虐管理对员工建言行为的负面影响

李姜锦,刘春林   

  1. 南京大学商学院
  • 通讯作者: 刘春林

Abstract: The current research majorly explores the methods which can be used to weaken the adverse impact of abusive supervision on employee in terms of organization, team and leadership, while few studies explore this impact from the perspective of employees’ cognition regulation. Based on the theory of cognitive dissonance, the hypothesis put forward in this research is that the emotional labor strategy of deep acting may make contributions to weakening the adverse impacts of abusive supervision on employees’ interactional justice. By deep acting (including positive refocus and perspective taking), the employees could genuinely reach the private acceptance of supervisors’ abuse, reducing their self-esteem threatening. Meanwhile, as the decreased interactional justice can directly affect the voice motivation of the employees, this paper further hypotheses that the interaction between deep acting and abusive supervision has an impact on the employees' voice (including both defensive voice and prosocial voice) through the mediation of interactional justice. To verify the above hypotheses, some surveys are carried out at 3 time points in a state-owned enterprise. At time point 1, the survey conducted a test to the perception of abusive supervision and deep acting (when encountering rude treating from the supervisors) on 623 invited members in 127 teams. At time point 2, which is 2 months after time point 1, 552 members rated their perception of interactional justice. Then, 4 months after time point 1, 109 team leaders rated the defensive voice and prosocial voice of their subordinates. The final matched sample is composed of 530 members from a total of 103 teams, with a response rate of 85.07% for all the individuals. In the results, the hypotheses put forward in this study are all verified. (1)The result of moderated regression analysis suggests that deep acting can do a favor in weakening the negative connection between abusive supervision and interactional justice (B= .18,p<.001). (2) The bootstrapping approach (2000 resamples) in Mplus 8.0 is further employed, which shows that the interaction between deep acting and abusive supervision has significant indirect effects (through the mediator, interactional justice) on both defensive voice (ind1=-.03, 95% CI = [-.06, -.01], excluding zero) and prosocial voice (ind2=.02, 95% CI = [.01, .04], excluding zero). Possible contributions of this research are as follows: firstly, it has broadened the perspective of response to abusive supervision. In the face of adverse effects caused by abuse, most existing studies only provide the correction thinking from “top-down” to respond to it, and regard employees as powerless to resist. However, from the conclusion of this study, it can be seen that employees are not totally negative in facing abuse. This paper takes “active acting to cognitive dissonance” as a breakthrough, and provides the way to turn passive into positive from the perspective of response. Secondly, it has advanced the research on the relationship between abusive supervision and voice. At present, studies generally believed that the relationship between them is negative. This study reveals that the interaction between deep acting and abusive supervision will improve the adverse effect of voice through interactional justice; and has found that this effect will have different results on different types of voice. Finally, it has verified the effect of deep acting and enriched the positive effect of emotional labor. It is known that study on emotional labor originated from scholars’ concern about its “dark side”. This paper proves the interactive effect of “deep acting strategy” and “abusive supervision”, which has a reduction effect on the negative impact of employees’ interactional justice and subsequent voice, and highlights the effectiveness of this strategy and the “positive side” of emotional labor.

Key words: abusive supervision, interactional justice, deep acting, voice

摘要: 针对辱虐管理给建言构成的负面作用,目前少有研究从员工管理认知的应对角度去考虑如何消减这一影响。本研究基于认知失调理论,在洞察互动公平与辱虐管理二者关系的基础上,提出深层调节这类基于认知调整的情绪劳动策略会帮助削弱辱虐管理对员工互动公平的不利作用。由于互动公平将直接影响员工向领导建言的动机,进而预测,深层调节与辱虐管理的交互会通过互动公平的中介影响员工建言(防御性和亲社会性建言)。通过对103个国企团队中530名员工分三阶段的调研,研究假设均得以验证。本文从员工基于调节认知以管理情绪的策略启发,揭示了深层调节这一对策的有效性,拓展了辱虐管理的应对视角,丰富了辱虐管理与建言领域的研究。

关键词: 辱虐管理, 深层调节, 互动公平, 建言