The Impact Of Observed Workplace Incivility On Job Performance: The Mediating Role Of Reward Expectancy And The Moderating Role Of Leader Behavioral Integrity

As a kind of injurious behavior with unobvious intentions and mild intensity,workplace incivility is widespread in the workplace.Many scholars have discussed and studied this kind of harmful behavior,mainly focusing on the perpetrators and victims of harmful behavior,third-party witnesses who observed this behavior have largely not been formally studied.According to the relevant literature observed workplace incivility,it mainly focuses on the impact of mental health,mood and job satisfaction of employees,the work performance of the most influential employees of the organization and its influence mechanism have not been discussed in detail.A variable closely related to employee performance is the reward expectancy.Reward expectancy is defined as the employee’s choice of hard work based on the expectation of receiving money,promotion,rewards,etc.This return will be reflected in the performance of various tasks.Once employees feel that the performance they have worked hard to achieve is not rewarded by the organization,then this balance will be broken,and the employee’s effort and performance will decrease accordingly.Therefore,not only the victims and perpetrators of workplace Incivility,but also third-party employees who witnessed workplace Incivility in the workplace should be considered in the research.In this study,we constructed a moderated mediation model based on the expectation theory,to explore the impact mechanism of observed workplace incivility on employees’ job performance,including reward expectancy as a mediating variable,and leadership integrity as a moderating variable to form a moderated mediation model.Through two studies and two different supervisor-employee paired data for analysis,this study found that:(1)Observed workplace incivility has a negative impact on employees’ job performance through the mediating role of reward expectancy;(2)Leader behavioral integrity moderates the relationship between observed workplace incivility and reward expectancy.When the level of leader behavioral integrity is low,the negative impact of workplace incivility behavior on the reward expectancy is very significant.(3)Leader behavioral integrity moderates the mediating effect of reward expectation on the relationship between observed workplace incivility and employee job performance.In other words,when the leader’s integrity level is high,reward expectancy does not have a significant mediating effect between observed workplace incivility and employee job performance.But when the level of leadership integrity is low,the intermediary effect is very significant.