Effect of Abusive Supervision on Employee Engagement and Job Satisfaction: The Mediating Role of Workplace Deviance

Abstract

Positive work relations are critical for an organization to be successful. Due to negative behaviors of employees the organizations are now moving their focus towards unethical/destructive leadership styles of supervisors (Zhang and Bednall, 2016; Yu et al., 2020). For two decades, since constructs on abusive supervision have been introduced (Tepper 2000), many researches have been conducted and explained that due to abusive supervision employees face impaired ability to performance and encounter high emotional exhaustion, anger (Peng et al. 2019), reduced job performance and show a reduced commitment at job (Peltokorpi and Ramaswami 2019; Michel et al. 2016). Abusive supervision’s negative consequences and outcomes (organizational and individual) have been recognized by many researchers (e.g., Tepper 2000; Simon et al. 2015; Lee et al., 2018) e.g., abusive supervision shows positive relation to turnover intentions, psychological distress and withdrawal (Tepper 2000) and negatively related to work engagement (Lyu et al., 2016), individual performance (Lee et al., 2018), organizational citizenship behavior (Simon et al. 2015) and job satisfaction of employees (Tepper 2000; Mackey et al., 2017). When employees have to face such issues, their attitude is unfriendly because they feel organization is unfair towards them and they need to take their frustration out some way or the other (Nair & Kamalanabhan, 2010). According to research, 10% workers have reported to face abusive supervision at the workplace. (Tepper et al., 2017).