Research On The Multi-level Model Of The Effects Of Abusive Supervision, Abusive Climate On Individual And Team Task Effevtiveness

In the business environment with highly environmental dynamism and complexity, ways to improve creativity and performance are key factors for enhancing organizational competitiveness. At the same time, more and more companies tend to accomplish tasks using work team as the basic unit. Work team can help motivating employee capability and creativity and integrating all kinds of resources to foster employee and team performance and creativity. Individual outcomes such as creativity and task performance are the foundation of the team outcomes. Thus, how to manage team members effectively seems critical for the improvement of team creativity and team performance.Leadership has both constructive and destructive sides. Abusive supervision is a common kind of leadership with downside effects. Abusive supervision is a kind of leadership that leaders abuse the subordinates constantly by the verbal or non-verbal behaviors without violating the rules of the firm. Abusive supervision may not harm the organization directly, but it can harm the organization indirectly through subordinates’ attitudes and behaviors. In America, 10% to 16% firm members are influenced by abusive supervision to different extent, which results in huge organizational losses. In China, the existence of “high and low order rank” is common under the influence of factors such as high power distance, collectivism and high uncertainty avoidance, thus making abusive supervision quite common in different kinds of organizations and its dark-side effects more pronounced. Current studies mainly focus on the relationship between positive leadership behaviors and individual or team outputs. However, as a kind of dark-side leadership, abusive supervision is quite common within organizations with relatively less research attention. The studies on abusive supervision mainly focus on how individual perceived abusive supervision affect individual outcomes. Little is done concerning the team-level effects of abusive supervision on team outputs and the cross-level effects of team abusive supervision on individual outputs.Based on the previous literatures, this study proposes a cross-level framework to examine the effects of abusive supervision on individual and team outputs from the social cognitive perspective and self-regulation perspective. We use two-wave survey to collect longitudinal, multi-source, subjective and objective data. We use comprehensive data analysis methods including factor analysis, hierarchical regression analysis and hierarchical linear modeling(HLM) to empirically test how abusive supervision and team abusive climate affect individual effectiveness and team effectiveness.In this study, we try to answer three research questions. First, how can abusive supervision affect employee role breadth self-efficacy and then affect individual creativity and task performance? Do individual promotion regulatory focus and prevention regulatory focus have differentiated moderating effects? Second, how can we define and measure abusive supervision and regulatory focus at team level? How does team abusive climate affect team creativity and team task performance through team efficacy? Do team promotion regulatory focus and prevention regulatory focus have differentiated moderating effects? Third, how does team abusive climate affect employee creativity and task performance through role breadth self-efficacy? Can team task interdependence and task goal clarity exert self-regulation effects?This study develops a multi-level model to understand how abusive supervision affect employee and team effectiveness based on the social cognitive and self-regulation perspective. This research includes three studies:Study 1: abusive supervision and employee effectiveness: a moderated mediation model. First, this study explores how abusive supervision affects employee effectiveness based on social cognitive and self-regulation perspective. Second, we choose a pharmaceutical company as the pre-test sample, which consists of 204 employees and 52 team leaders in 52 R&D teams. We conduct a two-wave survey using the sample of 419 employees and 133 leaders in 133 sales teams from two pharmaceutical sales companies. Finally, we use longitudinal and paired data to test all the hypotheses. The results show that abusive supervision negatively affects employee creativity and task performance through role breadth self-efficacy. The two kinds of regulatory focuses moderate the relationship between abusive supervision and employee role breadth self-efficacy. Specifically, promotion regulatory focus buffers the negative effect of abusive supervision on role breadth self-efficacy. Prevention regulatory focus strengthens the relationship between abusive supervision and employee role breadth self-efficacy. The result also shows that abusive supervision has the moderated mediation effects on employee creativity and task performance.Study 2: team abusive climate and team effectiveness: the social cognitive and self-regulation perspective. First, based on social information processing perspective and referent-shift consensus model, this study clearly defines and measures abusive climate and team regulatory focus. Second, this study explores how team abusive climate affects team effectiveness according to social cognitive perspective and self-regulation perspective. The data were collected from two pharmaceutical companies consisting of 419 employees and 133 leaders in 133 sales teams. A two-wave survey was done and the objective sales data of each sales team during three months were collected. We use longitudinal and paired data to test all the hypotheses.The result shows that team abusive climate negatively affects team creativity and team performance through team efficacy. The relationship between team abusive climate and team efficacy is moderated by team regulatory focus. When team promotion regulatory focus is high, the relationship between team abusive climate and team efficacy is weakened. When team prevention regulatory focus is high, the relationship between team abusive climate and team efficacy is strengthened. The result verifies the moderated mediation effect that team abusive climate has on team creativity and task performance.Study 3: team abusive climate and employee effectiveness: a cross-level perspective. This study proposes a cross-level model to examine how team abusive climate affects employee creativity and performance based on social cognitive theory. The data were collected from two pharmaceutical companies consisting of 419 employees and 133 leaders in 133 sales teams. We use longitudinal and paired data to test the hypotheses.The result shows that, team abusive climate has negative effect on employee role breadth self-efficacy and then harms employee creativity and performance. Team task interdependence and task goal clarity moderate the relationship between team abusive climate and employee role breadth self-efficacy. The negative relationship between team abusive climate and employee role breadth self-efficacy is weakened when team task interdependence is high. The negative relationship between team abusive climate and employee role breadth self-efficacy is weakened when task goal clarity is high. Also, team task interdependence negatively moderates the indirect relationship between team abusive climate and employee creativity/task performance.This study makes three main contributions:First, this study integrates social cognitive perspective and self-regulation perspective to explore how abusive supervision affect employee effectiveness. The result shows that abusive supervision affects employee creativity and task performance through social cognitive process. It also reveals the leadership factors and boundary conditions affecting the cognition process of the employees. The result provides important complements to studies on leadership and self-efficacy and extends understandings of the social cognitive theory and self-regulation theory. It also extends abusive supervision literature from a new research perspective.Second, this study extends the research of the integrated model of social cognition and self-regulation to team level and uncovers how abusive climate affects team effectivness. This study defines and measures abusive supervision and regulatory focus from team level and promotes the studies on regulatory focus and abusive supervision. The result shows the negative effects and the influencing mechanism of team abusive climate on team creativity and team performance. It promotes the studies on abusive supervision, team creativity and task performance. The study finds the differentiated moderating effects of two kinds of team regulatory focuses in the relationship between team abusive climate and team efficacy.Third, this study builds a cross-level framework and tests how team abusive climate affects the employee effectiveness. It also uncovers the cross-level boundary effects of team task interdependence and goal clarity. It builds a multi-level framework of abusive supervision and uncovers the mediating role of role breadth self-efficacy between abusive supervision and employee effectiveness and the mediating role of team efficacy between team abusive climate and team effectiveness. Meanwhile, this study uncovers the individual-level and team-level self-regulation factors from the aspects of self-regulation tendency(regulatory focus), goal(task goal clarity) and team contingency(team task interdependence). The study uncovers the cross-level mediation mechanism of how team abusive climate affects employee creativity and task performance. The result promotes the studies on abusive supervision, creativity and task performance. The result supports the arguments of individual-context interaction perspective and the substitutes for leadership perspective. It gives us better understandings of the goal setting theory and self-regulation theory. This study promotes the studies on multi-level leadership theory by extending the research levels and outcome factors of abusive supervision. It also promotes the theoretical studies on social cognitive theory and self-regulation theory from research levels and range of applications.