规则适应视角下辱虐管理的成因机制

基于规则适应及资源依赖理论的解释视角,本研究考察了下属工作绩效与政治技能对上级辱虐的影响。通过对采集自两家企业的243对领导-下属的配对问卷进行分析,本研究的多项式回归与响应面分析表明,当下属的工作绩效(遵循做事显规则)与政治技能(遵循做人潜规则)在较高水平上保持一致时,其遭受的上级辱虐最少。但这种较高水平的一致只能维持在特定范围内,当两者过高时,反而易遭致上级的辱虐行为。同时,在工作绩效与政治技能存在差异的情境下,相比于"高工作绩效,低政治技能"的下属,"低工作绩效,高政治技能"的下属遭受的上级辱虐要更少。文章分析并证明了遵循不同规则的下属会导致不同程度的上级辱虐。

The causes of abusive supervision from the perspective of rule-adaptation

Abusive supervision (AS) defined as sustained display of nonphysical hostility (including both verbal and nonverbal behaviors) enforced by managers against their subordinates (Tepper,2000) has drawn much attention from researchers.As a negative leadership behavior,it often leads to negative consequences in the workplace such as increasing employees' intention to quit,deviant behaviors,psychological distress and lowering the individuals' organizational commitment.Although much has been done to investigate the antecedents (e.g.,from the perspective of subordinate character,supervisor character and the environment) of the AS,little is known about why specific subordinates are treated with nonphysical hostility by their leaders (Tepper et al.,2011).To address this gap,the main purpose of the current study is to explore the united impacting mechanism of work performance and political skill.Based on perspective of rule-adaptation and resource dependence theory,we attempted to examine the congruence and incongruence effects of the task performance-political skill on leader abuse.To avoid common method variance problem,we collected data from different sources,that is,gathering variables political skill (PS,using Ferris et al.'s (2005) 18-item measure) and AS (using Tepper's (2000) 15-item measure) from the subordinates and organizational deviant behavior (using Bennett and Robinson's (2000)12-item measure) and task performance (TP,using Williams and Anderson's (2001) 5-item measure) from the supervisor.We finally got 243 effective dyads' information of the subordinate and their supervisors.The Cronbach's alpha coefficients of the above measures are 0.91,0.94,0.96 and 0.86 respectively and it's a multisource feedback research and appropriate to conduct polynomial regression with response surface analysis which could provide elaborate and abundant analyzing results.The analyses of 243 subordinate-supervisor dyads from two companies in China showed that (1) The more congruence of subordinate's PS and TP level,the less AS would be;(2) Under the condition of subordinate's TP-PS incongruence,the higher level of PS and lower level of TP,the less AS would be;(3) Under the condition of TP-PS congruence,the none-AS level rose to a peak and then fell down as subordinate's TP-PS levels rose which should be paid attention to.Theoretically,the study contributes to the areas of AS,rules and subordinates' workplace behaviors.Besides,the idea of resource dependence theory is also applied to the individual level and adds explanatory power in the relationship of TP-PS and AS.The practical implication of the study is that it provides explicit directions for the subordinates and the organization to cope with AS.We also discuss the limitations and future research directions of the study.