Abusive Supervision And Knowledge Sharing:A Study From Attachment And Social Cognitive Perspective

Knowledge has assumed special importance in this increasingly cut-throat society and has become the key enabler in achieving organizational competitive advantage,long-term sustainability and success.Recently,more and more organizational academics and practitioners put their focus on knowledge management,especially the most fundamental part—knowledge sharing.knowledge sharing,referring to the behavior of employees who have the ability to share knowledge consciously and voluntarily provide their own task-related experience and information to other employees in the same company,reduces the cost of acquiring knowledge and facilitates the generation of new knowledge.Among the many factors that affect knowledge sharing,leadership is considered a factor that cannot be ignored.However,the majority of research pertaining to leadership and knowledge sharing highlights the influence of positive leadership on knowledge sharing,rendering what the obstacles that negative leadership can bring to knowledge sharing lack of attention.Abusive supervision,as a typical counterproductive leadership,jeopardizes employee life satisfaction,job performance and increases employee turnover intention.Yet,the relationship between abusive supervision and knowledge sharing is under-investigated.Accordingly,this study aims to explore the relationship between the two.after a thorough literature review,we propose a moderated mediation model from the perspective of attachment and social information processing to uncover the mediating and moderating effects on the relationship between abusive supervision and knowledge sharing.specifically speaking,we proposed that employee relational attachment transmits the effects from abusive supervision to knowledge sharing and team forgiveness climate moderates the relationship between abusive supervision and relational attachment and the indirect effect between abusive supervision and knowledge sharing via relational attachment.Two survey studies and one experiment were conducted to verify our hypothesized model.in Study 1,we collected 256 valid surveys nested in 59 teams at the same time point with supervisor selfreporting abusive supervision to test the moderating effect of forgiveness climate.We gathered mutisource and time-lagged 260 valid surveys from 60 teams to test all the hypotheses.Multilevel path analyses were employed.Results from Study 1 suggested that forgiveness climate moderates the relationship between abusive supervision and knowledge sharing,such that when forgiveness climate is relatively high,the negative effect between abusive supervision and relational attachment is buffered.Study 2 results indicated:(1)relational attachment mediate the relationship between abusive supervision and knowledge sharing;(2)forgiveness climate moderates the relationship between abusive and relational attachment;(3)forgiveness climate moderates the indirect effects between abusive supervision and knowledge sharing,such that when forgiveness climate is high,the mediating effect is weaker than when it is low.In Study 3,we aimed to make up for the deficiencies in the data collection of abusive management and relational attachment with supervisor at the same time period in Study 1 and Study 2,increasing the credibility of the causal inferences between these two variables.The experimental results show that abusive management has a significant effect on relational attachment with supervisors.This study enriches our knowledge about the underlying process through which abusive supervision casts influence on knowledge sharing and the conditioning effects,carrying several theoretical and practical implications.And limitations are discussed,hoping they could be conquered and improved in future studies.