Three essays on avoiding the dark side of organizational behaviors

Abstract

This dissertation explores three issues: the role of workplace ostracism in predicting abusive supervision, the potential constructive employee outcomes of abusive supervision, and the adverse consequences of green psychological climate in the workplace. In Essay 1, I aimed to provide a novel perspective on why and how abusive supervision originates. I proposed that supervisors’ experience of being ostracized by coworkers threatens the ostracized supervisors’ sense of meaningful existence, which in turn triggers their abusiveness toward subordinates. I further suggested that the supervisors’ perception of their power over subordinates is a critical boundary condition of this mediation mechanism, such that the relationship is strengthened when perceived power is stronger rather than weaker. In Essay 2, departing from previous research which shows that abusive supervision induces detrimental employee outcomes, I examined how to create constructive consequences of abusive supervision. To do so, I identified the boundary conditions to change the negative effect of supervisory abuse on employees’ work engagement in a positive direction. I examined the interactive moderating effect of a personal resource (i.e., the positive causal attribution of abusive supervision) and a job resource (i.e., workplace friendship) on the relationship between abusive supervision and work engagement. In Essay 3, I demonstrated that green psychological climate has a dark side, especially in terms of employees’ fatigue related to the environmental issues. By highlighting the role of an employee’s commitment to the environment as a boundary condition, I showed that when an employee’s commitment to the environment is not aligned with a positive green psychological climate, the employee’s belief that pro-environmental behavior is inconvenient is triggered, thus eventually inducing environmental citizenship fatigue.