Effect Of Social Undermining On Employee Silence And Its Mechanisms

Interpersonal relationships are critical determinants of what occurs in any organization-how it functions,how effectively it performs its central tasks,and how it reacts to its external environment.However,social undermining refers to passive interpersonal behavior intended 'to hinder,over time,the ability to establish and maintain positive interpersonal relationships,work-related success,and favorable reputation.Meanwhile,social undermining not only will influence individual's psychological well-being,helplessness and self-efficacy,but also bring about the decreasing of individual's job satisfaction performance and thus affect the organizational performance and organizational climate.At the same time,employee silence is pervasive in organizations.When employee is aware of issues in the organization,for some reason,they finally decided to retain their opinions or filter part of their view,this silence behavior will bring negative effects to both organization and individuals.Given this,researchers have paid attention on social undermining and employee silence,and some of them has made some theoretical and practical achievements.Despite the significant progress,little research has discussed the impact of social undermining on other possible outcome variables.Moreover,the mediating and moderating effect between social undermining and its outcome variable remain nearly unexploited,and the domestic academic rarely pay attention on social undermining research.Therefore,this paper combination of western scholar's research and Chinese culture background will not only bring practical guidance to management,but also enrich the social undermining theoretical research framework.Based on social exchange theory and social cognition theory,this paper introduce psychological safety and perceived supervisory support as a mediating variable and a moderating variable,and tested a model about the mediating and moderating processes of social undermining and employee silence.This study was conducted in mainland China,and 205 effective questionnaires was collected.All date was analyzed through SPSS 19.0 and AMOS 21.0.Results of hierarchical regression analysis revealed that:(1)Social undermining is positively related to employee silence.(2)Psychological safety plays a partial mediating role between social undermining and employee silence.(3)Perceived supervisory support weaken the passive impact of social undermining and psychological safety.Finally,on the basis of the research conclusions,this paper puts forward reasonable advices for management practice:Firstly,company and organizations should establish a positive and mutually beneficial employee relationship,strengthen the monitoring and intervention of social undermining.Secondly,make a clear distinction between public and private interests,enhance the psychological safety of employees awareness.Thirdly,enlarge the internal communication channels and build a professional communication system.Finally,focus on employment support and talent management.The final text summarizes and abstracts the research limitations and future research prospects.