The Research On The Impact Of Abusive Supervision On Employees' Job Performance: The Moderated Role Of Psychological Capital

Leadership behavior have been a research hot-spot issues in management, and different behavior from leaders will have different effects on employees and organizations. Previous studies are mostly from a positive point of view of leadership behavior to the organization and members of the positive impact. In fact, the leadership behavior also has its dark and negative point. And from a negative point of view to explore leadership behavior and its impact are relatively less. However, in recent ten years researches about the negative style of leadership are beginning of the study of the prevalence.Abusive supervision as a typically negative style of leadership behavior is raised by Tepper in 2000. Tepper defined abusive supervision as"the sustained display of hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviors, excluding physical contact". Other foreign researchers confirmed abusive supervision would reduce employee job and life satisfaction, employee performance and organizational commitment, and increased work-family conflict and turnover, and some employees even lead to reprisals etc.Although there is some harvest in foreign researches about abusive supervision, which is a negative style of leadership behavior,China-based organizational context of abusive supervision in theory or empirical studies is still relatively small. And also previous researches have not yet taken workers at the production line of state-owned enterprises as sample. Meantime,most studies are concerned about how the abusive supervision leads to negative effects,for what employees'psychological resources can mitigate the adverse effects of abusive supervision is rare. Therefore, this study is based on the previous studies and point out the progress and shortcomings of abusive supervision. Thus, the model of this study is taken abusive supervision as the independent variable, employees'job performance as the dependent variable, and psychological capital as the moderator. After doing regression analysis about 368 workers at the production line of state-owned enterprises, this study confirms that:(1)This study demonstrates that abusive supervision also exist in our state-owned enterprises, and there is a negative correlation between abusive supervision and employees'job performance, also between abusive supervision and two dimensions of employees'job performance(task performance and contextual performance). Thus, when the subordinates experience abusive supervision from their leaders, employees'job performance, task performance and contextual performance will lead to reduce significantly.(2)In this study, psychological capital is taken to deal with declining employees'job performance which is caused by abusive supervision. Psychological capital, one of four capital, is a resource for individuals and defined as the development of a positive psychological state in individuals'growth process. And individuals owned psychological capital in higher degree can better cope with dilemma, stress and difficult problems, and continue efforts to win success. Therefore, if the subordinates experience abusive supervision, the staff owned higher psychological capital can effectively respond to inharmonious work environment and alleviate the decline in task performance and contextual performance caused by abusive supervision. Thus, psychological capital can be reduced the negative effect on employees'job performance caused by abusive supervision.Finally, based on conclusions of this study, there are some management recommendations for subordinates, leaders and organizations in the environment of abusive supervision. This study seeks to, to some extent, broaden the boundaries of abusive supervision and enrich existing theoretical and empirical researches; in practice, it could help managers to recognize the substance of abusive supervision better, and hope they can constrain and correct their misconduct. So the purpose of improving employees'job performance and organizational performance can be reached, and also maintain the effective operation of the enterprise.