Self‐protective reactions to peer abusive supervision: The moderating role of prevention focus and the mediating role of performance instrumentality

• Author: Andrew Li,Ping Shao,Mary Mawritz
• Published date: 01 January 2018
• Date: 01 January 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2206

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Self‐protective reactions to peer abusive supervision: The

moderating role of prevention focus and the mediating role of

performance instrumentality

Ping Shao

1

|Andrew Li

2

|Mary Mawritz

3

1

College of Business Administration, California

State University, Sacramento, California, U.S.A.

2

Department of Management, Marketing, and

General Business College of Business, West

Texas A&M University, Canyon, Texas, U.S.A.

3

LeBow College of Business, Drexel

University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

Correspondence

Ping Shao, College of Business Administration,

California State University, Sacramento, 6000

J St., Sacramento, California 95819, U.S.A.

Email: pshao@csus.edu

Summary

Across 3 studies, we apply a self‐protection perspective of observed mistreatment to examine a

moderated mediation model on “when”and “why”third parties are motivated by peer abusive

supervision. We hypothesize that prevention‐focused third parties will increase their perfor-

mance effort as a response to peer abusive supervision, and this effect is mediated by perfor-

mance instrumentality. In a field study of working adults (Study 1) and an experimental study

that manipulated peer abusive supervision (Study 2), we found that peer abusive supervision

interacted with third parties' prevention focus to predict their performance effort such that peer

abuse was positively related to third parties' performance effort only for those high on prevention

focus. Results were replicated in a second field study of working adults (Study 3). Further, we

found support for the mediating effect of performance instrumentality. The theoretical and prac-

tical implications of our results are discussed.

KEYWORDS

peer abusive supervision, performance effort, performance instrumentality, prevention focus

1|INTRODUCTION

Abusive supervision, which is defined as “subordinates' perceptions of

the extent to which supervisors engage in the sustained display of hos-

tile verbal and nonverbal behaviors, excluding physical contact”

(Tepper, 2000, p. 178), is rather pervasive in the workplace, affecting

more than 13% of the workforce in the United States (see Tepper,

2007). Not surprisingly, most research on abusive supervision thus

far has primarily focused on the effects of an individual's own abuse

or how abusive supervision impacts direct victims of such mistreat-

ment. This research has found that abusive supervision is related to a

number of negative employee outcomes, such as increases in psycho-

logical distress (e.g., Harvey, Stoner, Hochwarter, & Kacmar, 2007) and

workplace deviance (Thau, Bennett, Mitchell, & Marrs, 2009) and

decreases in creativity (Liu, Liao, & Loi, 2012), helping behavior, and

task performance (Peng, Schaubroeck, & Li, 2014). However, focusing

only on direct victims implicitly assumes that abusive supervision

occurs in a social vacuum and fails to consider how third parties may

be influenced by their coworkers' abuse. This oversight is unfortunate

given that third parties can have strong reactions to others' mistreat-

ment that can range from sympathy for the victim (e.g., helping the

victim and punishing the perpetrator) to a lack of sympathy (e.g., blam-

ing the victim and siding with the perpetrator; Skarlicki, O'Reilly, &

Kulik, 2015). Therefore, abusive supervision can have serious conse-

quences not only for the victim and the perpetrator but also for other

organizational members not directly impacted by the abuse.

As such, scholars have begun to examine the effects of peer abu-

sive supervision, or “the extent to which coworkers are abused by the

same leader”(Peng et al., 2014, p. 1385). For example, observed mis-

treatment has been found to be related to observer supervisor‐

directed deviance (Mitchell, Vogel, & Folger, 2015), willingness to

engage in coworker abuse (Harris, Harvey, Harris, Cast, 2013), and

decreased performance on routine and creative tasks (Porath & Erez,

2009). Overall, these investigations have significant workplace implica-

tions, showing that abusive supervision may be more costly than pre-

viously estimated as it not only affects direct victims but also

observers of the abuse (Peng et al., 2014).

For the most part, research on peer abusive supervision has

focused on the dysfunctional effects of this phenomenon. This

approach is consistent with the deontic justice literature (Folger,

1998, 2001) and a moral imperative perspective (Skarlicki et al.,

2015), suggesting that third parties react negatively to observed

Received: 24 April 2016 Revised: 21 April 2017 Accepted: 16 May 2017

DOI: 10.1002/job.2206

12 Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2018;39:12–25.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job