Supervisor Bottom-line Mentality,Facades Of Conformity,and Proactive Work Behavior:The Moderating Effect Of Employee Collectivistic Orientation

Currently,organizations have become more dynamic and volatile,leading to an increase in managers supporting or even fostering intense,competitive atmospheres within their organizations.Given these evolving work environments,employees find themselves compelled to work overtime and maintain a high level of enthusiasm towards their jobs simply to preserve their relative social standing and their work opportunities.Consequently,the issue of bottom-line mentality,from both a theoretical and practical perspective,has evolved into a grave and pervasive problem globally.Therefore,understanding and addressing the adverse implications of supervisorial bottom-line mentality is not only crucial but also urgent.Despite the fact that existing studies have shown,from moral perspective,the inhibitory effect of supervisor bottom-line mentality on the long-term developments of organizations as well as employees,most studies fail to take into account the authentic perspective on the mechanism of supervisor bottom-line mentality on employees.Supervisors with a pronounced bottom-line mentality hold exceptionally high expectations for their employees’ performance,which may compel employees seeking to maintain their emotional and relationship ties to the organization to resort to self-protective,inauthentic strategies such as ’Facades of Conformity’,in an effort to sustain positive survival and development prospects within the organization.Furthermore,considering the potential economic and social costs that destructive behaviors might impose on employees,they are inclined to adopt more moderate deception tactics to mitigate the possible impacts of supervisor bottom-line mentality.However,few studies have examined the potential covert self-protective behavior tactics that employees can use to counteract supervisor bottom-line mentality.Based on the need-to-belong theory and conservation of resources theory,the study proposed a moderated mediation model to explore the relationship between supervisor bottom-line mentality and employee proactive work behavior,and introduce facades of conformity as the mediator and collectivistic orientation as the second-stage moderator.With the aid of SPSS and MPLUS software,an empirical study was conducted using the questionnaire survey approach.To ensure the validity of the research data and the repeatability of the research conclusions,two study processes were designed:Study Process 1 was a time-lagged survey based on 212 participants that were obtained from Chinese private enterprises employees;Study Process 2 was a time-lagged,multi-source survey based on 130 subordinates nested with 36 leaders.The results showed that supervisor bottom-line mentality was positively related to employee facades of conformity;Facades of conformity mediated the positive relationship between supervisor bottom-line mentality and employee proactive behavior;Employee collectivist orientation moderated the relationship between facades of conformity and proactive behavior and the indirect relationship between supervisor bottom-line mentality and employee proactive behavior via facades of conformity,such that the two effects were negative only when collectivist orientation was low.These findings contribute significantly not only to the existing body of research on facades of conformity,but also expand the scope of studies on the supervisor bottom-line mentality from an authentic perspective.The insights can aid organizations in understanding the underlying mechanisms of supervisor bottom-line mentality and employee facades of conformity.Furthermore,they offer guidance to enhance hierarchical management strategies for employees with differing degrees of collectivism orientation and to foster awareness of proactive work behavior among employees.