Third-party reactions to supervisory mistreatment: a multilevel moderated mediation model

Zhang, Yucheng Eason, Chen, Wansi, Liu, Mingwei and Li, Chunyun (2015) Third-party reactions to supervisory mistreatment: a multilevel moderated mediation model. , Sonia Taneja (ed.) In Academy of Management Proceedings. vol. 2015, Academy of Management. p. 12601 . (doi:10.5465/ambpp.2015.12601abstract).

Abstract

Integrating a relational perspective with recent theoretical development on third parties’ moral emotions, we developed a multilevel moderated mediation model that explained why and how third parties reacted to supervisory mistreatment of their coworkers and what factor at the supervisor-level moderated their different reactions. We tested this model with three-wave survey data collected from a sample of 882 team members and 109 team leaders. The results showed that third parties, who received favorable treatments from the exchange relationship with victimized coworkers, would feel morally guilty for supervisory mistreatment of their coworkers. To alleviate guilt, third parties would react to both the victim and perpetrator. In addition, supervisor’s power distance orientation had opposing cross-level moderation effects, which strengthened the positive influence of moral guilt on victim-target reaction (i.e., coworker aid), whereas weakened the positive effect of moral guilt on perpetrator-target reaction (i.e., report mistreatment to a higher-level authority). Both theoretical and practical implications were discussed.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Author: Yucheng Eason Zhang

Download statistics