Abusive Supervision And Public Servants'Work Withdrawal Behavior: A Moderated Mediating Model

Work withdrawal behavior refers to the work attitude or behavior of employees in the workplace that are intended to avoid job roles and work tasks.It subsumes actions like lateness to work,absenteeism,taking long breaks,fake sick leave and so on.It has become a pressing issue and there is a need to examine the antecedents of work withdrawal behaviors.Chinese public servants are a special working group in China.The lasting effect of dawdling along will not only affect individual work performance,but also affect government work efficiency and people's satisfaction negatively.Most of the researches on work withdrawal behaviors are based on enterprise employees.Due to the different culture and system,the research results from domestic and foreign enterprises are difficult to directly apply to the civil servants.Therefore it is necessary to investigate the specific mechanism affecting the work withdrawal behavior of civil servants.In the public organizations especially in China,leaders' evaluation and guanxi between leader and follower have significant impacts on public servants.Based on the leader-member exchange theory and social comparison theory,we discussed the effect of abusive supervision on work withdrawal behavior,meanwhile the mediating role of leader-member exchange social comparation(LMXSC)and the moderating role of subordinate's optimism.In the formal investigation,the on-the-job civil servants were used as research objects,and on-site questionnaires were conducted in the form of paper and pencil.The objects came from different areas including Guangdong province,Shandong province and Zhejiang province.168 valid questionnaires were collected,and the data were analyzed using SPSS21.0 and AMOS21.0.The main results are as follows:(1)demographic variables in public servants' work withdrawal behavior are significantly different,such as age,service year,rank and frequency of interaction with leaders.(2)abusive supervision,and leader-member exchange social comparation significantly predicted the work withdrawal behavior of civil servants;(3)leader-member exchange social comparation partially mediated the relationship between abusive supervision and work withdrawal behavior;(4)optimism is a moderator variance in the relationship between leader-member exchange social comparation and work withdrawal behavior;(5)the mediating effect of abusive supervision and work withdrawal behavior was strengthened when optimism is low.When optimism is high,however,the mediating effect of LMXSC was not significant.