The Effects Of Vicarious Abusive Supervision On Third Party Employees’ Work Engagement:the Role Of Work Anxiety,Promoted Regulatory Focus And Colleague Support

Since Tepper proposed abusive supervision,this negative leadership style has attracted the attention of many scholars.However,most of the existing literature studies from the perspective of the implementer and the victim,and few studies on the impact of third-party groups in the same organization;At the same time,with the vigorous development of positive psychology,work engagement,as a positive and fulfilling emotion and cognitive state in work,can enable employees to generate positive emotions,show a high level of energy and psychological resilience,enhance emotional commitment to the organization,and better predict innovation behavior and work performance.It has increasingly become one of the hot spots in management research.In view of the above,based on the Affective Events Theory and the Conservation of Resources Theory,this paper responds to the call that "the research on abusive supervision from the perspective of the third party should focus on strengthening the research on the internal mechanism of the third party’s emotion to the third party’s behavior",and takes specific negative emotional,work anxiety,as the intermediary variable,constructs the third party vicarious abusive supervision perception model of “leadership behavior stimulation-third-party employees’ emotional perception-third-party employees’ attitude and behavior changes”,and also explores the boundary role of personal positive trait — promoted regulatory focus and external resource— colleague support.This research anonymously distributed 578 valid questionnaires to in-service employees through online and offline combination,and then we used SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 24.0 to analyze the data for common method bias,reliability and validity test,correlation,test factors and demographic differences,then,hierarchical regression analysis and the Process macro plugin were employed to conduct a Bootstrap test on the mediation and regulatory mediation in the model.The empirical results show that: vicarious abusive supervision and job anxiety both negatively affect the third-party employees’ work engagement and its sub dimensions of vigor,dedication,absorption;job anxiety plays a part of mediating role between vicarious abusive supervision and work engagement of third-party employees;promoted regulatory focus plays a regulatory role between vicarious abusive supervision and work anxiety of third-party employees,that is,high promoted regulatory focus can weaken the positive impact between vicarious abusive supervision and work anxiety;colleague support plays a moderating role between work anxiety and work engagement of third-party employees,that is,high level of colleague support will weaken the negative impact of work anxiety on work engagement;Furthermore,both promoted regulatory focus and colleague support adjusted the mediating effect of third-party employees’ job anxiety among the main effects,that is,the lower the level of promoted regulatory focus,the stronger the mediating effect of job anxiety;the lower the degree of support of colleagues,the stronger the mediating effect of job anxiety.This paper enriches the relevant literature on third-party abusive supervision,provides an emotion driven path for subordinate attitudes and behaviors caused by abusive supervision,and also deeply explores other factors that can affect this path.On the basis of empirical analysis,this paper puts forward management suggestions for leaders,organizations and employees themselves.