| In the era of VUCA(i.e.,volatility,uncertainty,complexity,and ambiguity),companies lie in a rapidly changing business environment.A typical example is the emergence of the black swan "COVID-19" in 2020.Only leaders who can cultivate new opportunities in the crisis and open up new opportunities in the changing situation can effectively deal with it.Therefore,organizational leadership turnover is more frequent than before.Leadership change will lead to employees,especially the former leader’s "insider"(employee who holds a high-quality leader-member exchange relationship with their previous leader),perceive work-related identity discrepancy.Work-related identity discrepancy(or identity loss)refers to the phenomenon that external events break the cognitive balance of existing work-related identity and lead to a gap between one’s actual self and the ideal or ought self.Most of the existing studies focus on sociology and psychology by exploring the impact of identity discrepancy on individual emotions,attitudes,and other variables.In contrast,little attention is paid to the impact of work-related identity discrepancy on former leaders’ "insider" work behavior in the workplace.Due to the leadership change,the former leader’s "insider" will perceive work-related identity discrepancy,resulting in the double loss of emotional resources(emotional exhaustion)and psychological resources(supervisor incivility),and further trigger counterproductive work behavior.Thus,this study adopts an experimental method and questionnaire method.Additionally,from the perspective of resource conservation theory,our study explores the influence mechanism of work-related identity discrepancy on counterproductive work behavior.This paper includes two empirical studies.In study 1,we first design 2 Pre-test to confirm the effectiveness of the manipulation of script.Then we select 160 college students as study samples,using a 2(high work-related identity discrepancy/low work-related identity discrepancy)*2(high difference supervisor incivility/low supervisor incivility)multiple-variable experiment was adopted to present the form stimulus of situational stories,and then 153 valid experimental data were collected and processed.Through this experiment,we preliminarily test the causal relationship between the variables in the hypothesis model.However,the only intern work experience of the students selected in this study cannot fully reflect the research conclusions in the workplace.In order to overcome the shortcomings of study 1,study 2 was further designed.In study 2,we collected 863 valid data from 24 enterprises in southern and central China.SPSS22.0and MPLUS7.0 were used to conduct reliability and validity tests,correlation analysis,hierarchical regression,and Bootstrap analysis on the data.We found that:(1)work-related identity discrepancy has a significant positive effect on counterproductive work behavior;(2)emotional exhaustion significantly mediates the main effect between work-related identity discrepancy and counterproductive work behavior;(3)supervisor incivility plays a moderating role between work-related identity discrepancy and emotional exhaustion,specifically,the relationship between work-related identity discrepancy and emotional exhaustion decreases as supervisor incivility increases;and(4)supervisor incivility further influences the positive indirect relationship between work-related identity discrepancy and counterproductive work behavior via emotional exhaustion: the mediating role of emotional exhaustion weakens when supervisor incivility is high and strengthens when it is low.Interestingly,different from the single strong/weak role of situational moderation in previous studies,this study finds that the new leader’s supervisor incivility presents a substitute effect on work-related identity discrepancy caused by leadership transition.In other words,compared with work-related identity discrepancy brought by leadership change,the new leader’s negative behaviors have a more significant destructive impact on employees.Therefore,managers should pay attention to the negative effects of leadership replacement and,more importantly,strengthen the supervision on successors’ negative behaviors.Finally,this study provides an "effective medicine" to how enterprises deal with the counterproductive work behavior caused by leadership change. |
