A Study Of The Cross-layer Impact Of Abusive Management And Organizational Silence On Job Performance

High-performance of employees is a powerful guarantee for an organization's healthy and continued growth. And employees working under a positive climate can perform better. However, employee silence can heavily damage organizational performance and innovation climate. And it's very detrimental to find and solve problems for an organization if silence at the individual level spreads to the whole organization and then all the employees are in a negative climate. Therefore, silence from individual level to organization level is a problem that a modern organization should pay urgent attention to and solve, in order to keep an organization operating successfully and its employees performing better.During exploration of employee silence formation mechanism, abusive supervision, which impairs negatively employee psychology, has been widely concerned by scholars and leaders. Abusive supervision, originating from western literature, arises from subordinates' perceptions of supervisors' words and behaviors under a particular management situation. Once the subordinates' perception has been formed, it is detrimental to employees' psychological health and organization performance. Abusive supervision isn't rare seen in Chinese organizations and researchers have made a massive research effort on this field. But the results from existing literature are based on the definition and scale of abusive supervision that researchers in Western developed under their culture background. Because of the significant differences between Chinese culture and Western culture, it is difficult to study the management style in Chinese organizations with fully adopting the concept connotation and measurement scale of abusive supervision from western literature. Therefore, in order to make our study with more practical significance, firstly, we based on western theory, literature review and open-ended questionnaire, and then find that the connotation of abusive supervision in nature is not hostility, but unfriendliness perceived by employees. And it includes four factors:self-esteem abuse, rights and interests abuse, instructions abuse and decision abuse. Secondly, building on the definition and measurement scale development of the Chinese indigenous abusive supervision, we make a further research to study the relationship between the Chinese indigenous abusive supervision and employees' performance and select employee silence as mediator at the individual level. Furthermore, managers'behave or leadership style is one of the most important factors shaping organizational climate. So when abusive supervision prevails in an organization, a kind of hostile climate would be bound to be perceived by employees, namely, abusive climate. Abusive climate is a kind of negative climate and exacerbate organization silence easily, and then impair employees'performance. Thus, the study also examined whether abusive climate would have a bad influence on employees' performance through the mediation effect of organization climate at the organization level. Finally, compared with the mechanism of abusive supervision to employees' performance at different levels and based differences and similarities between them, the study put forward more targeted suggestions of improving organization climate and employees' performance for business fields.Based on data from 348 full-time employees in 52 work units, the study constructs a hierarchical linear model to make regression analysis. The results show that, at the individual level, (1) Four dimensions of abusive supervision all have significantly positive effect on employee silence. (2) Employee silence goes against three dimensions of employees' performance. (3) Employee silence plays a mediating role in full in three paths, from instructions abuse to task performance, from self-esteem abuse and decision abuse to job dedication, from self-esteem abuse and decision abuse to interpersonal facilitation respectively. At the organization level, (1) Climate with decision abuse aggravates organizational silence. (2) Climate with instructions abuse impairs task performance. And climate with decision abuse has negative effect on task performance, job dedication and interpersonal facilitation. (3) Organization silence has a partially mediating effect on the relationship climate with decision abuse and performance.