Abstract: With the vigorous development of positive psychology, researchers are paying more and more attention to work engagement, which refers to a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind. It has been found that work engagement is related to job performance and that it appears to demonstrate incremental validity over job attitudes in predicting performance. Thus, organizational researchers have devoted great attention to seeking ways to effectively improve the employees work engagement, and found that positive leadership styles play an important role in the development of employee's work engagement. However, few studies to date document the role of the detrimental effects of destructive leadership (e. g., abusive supervision) on employees work engagement. In addition, there are few empirical researches to explore the role of personality traits (e. g., hostile attribution bias) in the relationship between abusive supervision and work engagement. On this basis, we tend to explore the moderating role of hostile attribution bias, which is defined as an interpretive bias wherein individuals exhibit a tendency to interpret others' ambiguous behaviors as hostile rather than benign, in the relationship between abusive supervision and work engagement.
473 employee questionnaires were distributed to the 9 companies located in Shanghai, Suzhou, and Chongqing. After screening out some problematic cases, the final sample consisted of 353 employees (response rate was 75%). Of the 353 respondents, 53% employees ranged from 20～29 years old, 269% employees had a high school degree above, and 739% employees had 3 or above tenure. To examine the distinctiveness of the study variables, we conducted a confirmatory factor analysis using LISREL 870. We also employed a multiple regression analysis to test hypotheses of the current study using SPSS 200.
Results indicated that: After controlling for age, gender, education background and organizational tenure, (1) abusive supervision could negatively predict work engagement, (2) and the negative relationship between abusive supervision and work engagement is moderated by hostile attribute bias such that the relationship would be strengthened when hostile attribute bias is high rather than low.
Our findings contribute to advance the extant research. Most studies have focused on the prediction of positive leadership styles for employees work engagement, which may have obscured some negative leadership styles (e. g., abusive supervision) that can exactly explain why employees dont engage in work. Moreover, there is a paucity of research on the moderating role of hostile attribution bias in the relationship between abusive supervision and work engagement.
The current study also contributes to our understanding of abusive supervision and suggests some paths by which managers and organizations could decrease the occurrence of abusive supervision toward employees and thus improve the level of work engagement. And also, it's necessary to cultivate employees' positive cognition (e. g., mindfulness) to help them interpret their supervisors behaviors as benign, rather than hostile, which contributes to minimize the negative influence of abusive supervision.