The Impact Of Abusive Supervision On Employee Performance: The Moderated Roles Of Neuroticism And Conscientiousness

Leadership behavior has been a research hot-spot issues in management, the research on leadership behaviour from a positive point of view has been the mainstream and obtained fruitful research results. Recently, more and more scholars start to pay close attention to the negative leadership behaviour which has been ignored before, and abusive supervision is a typical negative leadership behaviour. Abusive supervision is defined as the sustained display of hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviours, excluding physical contact. Foreign scholars have made great empirical research on abusive supervision, according to their research, abusive supervision has significant negative influence on employee and organization, including reduce employee job satisfaction and organization performance, increase the intent to quit job and aggravate the conflict between career and family.Although the negative influence which abusive supervision may bring out has been proved in the previous empirical research, the research on abusive supervision based on Chinese organizational context is still relatively small. Considered the special Chinese cultural background, such as long-term orientation,high-power grade, it is necessary to conduct research on abusive supervision in Chinese organization. Besides, the research on potential moderators is rare, especially on what factors can mitigate or strengthen the adverse effects of abusive supervision.This study probes how personality affects the action process of abusive supervision, which will extend the research range of abusive supervision, fill the gap of the current research, and offer some help to the future relevant research on abusive supervision.Firstly, this study proves that the abusive supervision also exits in Chinese organization and affects the employee performance in a negative way, which includes task performance and context performance. The supervisors in the organization should realize the negative influence on employee performance and avoid to conduct abusive supervision to build favorable work atmosphere.Secondly, through the empirical research, this study finds out that employees' neuroticism moderates the relation between abusive supervision and employee performance in a negative way significantly. That is, the more nervous the employee is, the more negative the abusive affects employee performance, which includes task performance and context performance.Thirdly, this study finds out that employees' conscientiousness moderates the relation between abusive supervision and employee performance, which includes task performance and context performance, in a positive way significantly through the empirical research. That is, the more conscientious the employee is, the less negative the abusive affects employee performance.The above research results shows that abusive supervision could affects employee performance negatively as a typical negative leadership behaviour. The employee with different personality may perceive and react to abusive supervision differently, and neuroticism and conscientiousness have a positive or negative influence on the relation between abusive supervision and employee performance separately. When facing the high nervous employee, the supervisors should choose a democracy leadership style instead of abusive supervision. The high conscientiousness of the employee can not be the excuse for the managers to conduct abusive supervision, it should a the criteria for recruitment and promotion.Currently, the research based on Chinese background is still rarely, the future study should probe the abusive supervision ,to help the supervisiors have a better understanding of the adverse effect which abusive supervision may bring to employee and the organization, and standard their leadership behaviour, to help the employee bring out their potentials and achieve the double-win effect for both the employee and the organization.