Managers behaving unethically: coping with the ebb and flow of job insecurity through abusive supervision

Fu Yang, Xiaoyu Huang, Hong Deng, Jacqueline Coyle-Shapiro, Mengying Xie and Zihan Zhou

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Increasingly complex and volatile work environments challenge long-term employment and job security. Managers are not exempt from this, because they also often perceive their own jobs to be precarious. Drawing upon conservation of resources theory, we offer a fresh perspective to understand how and when abusive supervision is induced by manager job insecurity on a daily basis. We draw upon manager need for power as a within-person novel explanatory mechanism to explain why job insecurity triggers managers to display abusive supervision on a daily basis. To test our model, we conducted a study over a period of 10 consecutive days, using an experience sampling methodology, in which 126 managers in Chinese banks completed 1,058 daily surveys. In agreement with our hypotheses, we found that manager need for power, triggered by job insecurity, is a proximal cause of abusive supervision on a daily basis, after controlling for several other variables that have been found to lead to abusive supervision. The detrimental effects of daily manager job insecurity are alleviated when managers are equipped with higher levels of trait resilience and daily state mindfulness. Thus, our findings provide a more comprehensive picture of how managers’ stable and dynamic resources operate as beneficial buffers, alleviating the harm resulting from a daily workplace stressor—in this case, job insecurity. Overall, our study traces the fluctuation of a specific resource, and reveals the consequences of manager job insecurity from a leader-centric perspective.

Keywords: abusive supervision; manager job insecurity; need for power; state mindfulness; trait resilience; AAM requested (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 J50 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2024-10-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Business Ethics, 25, October, 2024. ISSN: 0167-4544

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/125948/ Open access version. (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Unavailable (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/125948/ [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/125948/)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:125948

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().