Summary We investigated the mediating role of the leader–member exchange (LMX) in the association of abusive supervision and employee work behaviors (task performance and organizational citizenship behaviors toward the organization and individuals). Using data collected from 366 supervisor–subordinate dyads, we found that LMX fully mediated the negative effects of abusive supervision on all three work behaviors. In addition, we conducted a supplementary study on the basis of the data collected from 54 supervisor–subordinate dyads from a garment company, and we found that LMX mediated the relationship between abusive supervision and employee objective future performance with interactional justice controlled. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Departing from past research on managers' responses to employee voice, we propose and examine a nonlinear linkage between promotive/prohibitive voice and managers' evaluations of voicers (i.e., manager-rated voicers' promotability and overall performance). Drawing from social persuasion theory, we theorize that managers tend to give more positive evaluations to employees who engage in a moderate frequency of promotive/prohibitive voice than those who either rarely speak up or speak up very frequently. In Study 1, based on a sample from a Chinese bank, we found that leader-member exchange quality (LMX) moderated the inverted U-shaped linkage of prohibitive voice with manager-rated promotability of voicers, whereas the frequency of promotive voice was not related to promotability, irrespective of levels of LMX. In Study 2, using employee-reported voice frequency, rather than the manager-rated measures adopted in Study 1, we largely replicated the main findings of Study 1 based on a sample from an information technology firm in the United States. In Study 3, using another U.S. sample, from a financial services firm, we found that manager-perceived voice constructiveness mediated the curvilinear interactive effect of prohibitive voice (rather than promotive voice) and LMX on managers' evaluations of employees' overall performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

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We examined the conditions under which workplace ostracism promotes prosocial reactions (i.e., helping behavior) and deters antisocial behavior (i.e., social loafing). Using data from 213 employees and their direct supervisors, we found that when group identification is strong, workplace ostracism increases the helping behavior and decreases the social loafing of employees. Moreover, we found that employees' tenure further moderates this effect; for those employees who have a strong group identification and long tenure, the positive association of ostracism and helping behavior is the strongest.

We investigated how abusive supervision influences interactions between third-party observers and abused victims and hypothesized when and why third parties react maliciously toward victims of abusive supervision. Drawing on the theory of rivalry, we predicted that third-party observers would experience an “evil pleasure” (schadenfreude) when they perceive a high level of rivalry with the victims of abusive supervision and that the experienced schadenfreude then would motivate third parties to engage in interpersonal destructive behaviors (i.e., undermining, incivility, and interpersonal deviance) toward the victims. We further proposed that such malicious reactions would be attenuated if groups have a high level of cooperative goals. Results based on one experimental study and two time-lagged field studies lend support to our propositions.

Extant voice research has focused mainly on the conditions under which employees speak up, but we have limited knowledge about how employees speak up. This study examines voice tactics or the various ways in which employees express concerns to or share suggestions with their managers. Based on the notion that voice is a deliberative behavior, we draw upon a cost–benefit framework and propose that voice tactics are influenced by messages' characteristics and managers' stable and temporal characteristics. Specifically, we examine the joint effects of issue importance, perceived managerial openness, and managers' positive mood on employees' public (vs. private) and formal (vs. informal) voice tactics. Across two independent studies, our findings demonstrate that employees tend to use public channels and formal procedures only when three conditions are met simultaneously: (a) the issue is important, (b) managers are perceived as being open to employees' voice, and (c) managers are in a positive mood at the time of voicing. In addition, we found that speaking up via public channels or formal procedures is positively related to the success of voice.

Group members gain social status via giving favors to others, but why and when they do so remain unclear in the literature. Building on social exchange theory and social status literature, we identify three types of favor giving among group members (generous, stingy, and matched) and propose that an affective mechanism (i.e., gratitude) and a cognitive mechanism (i.e., perceived competence) underlie the relationship between favor giving and status attainment. Specifically, generous/stingy favor giving has a linear relationship with status attainment through both gratitude and perceived competence, whereas matched favor giving has a curvilinear relationship with status attainment only through perceived competence. An experimental study and a field study lend support to our propositions. Our study complements the literature by offering a complete picture of how three types of favor giving among group members shape their social status in different ways.

During family firm succession, parent-incumbents are often caught up in a paradox of both empowering and dominating their child-successors. To understand this recurring phenomenon, we draw from socioemotional wealth literature and a philosophical account of the power-transfer paradox in ancient patriarchal monarchies to hypothesize that parent-incumbents tend to exert generational coercive control when their child-successors are seen as very unwilling and incapable or very willing and capable of taking over patriarchal family organizations. We test our hypotheses in three studies. In Study 1, we coded data from succession cases in Chinese patriarchal monarchies (403 BC to 959 AD) and found support for the predicted non-linear effects of successor-princes’ willingness (63 cases) and capability (80 cases) on their father-kings’ coercive control (persecuting or murdering the princes). In Study 2, based on survey data from parent–child dyads of 157 family firms in Taiwan and mainland China, again, we found U-shaped effects of child-successors’ willingness and capability on parent-incumbents’ coercive control (restraining successors’ power). Moreover, parent-incumbents’ highly narcissistic personality attenuated these U-shaped relationships because they tend to devalue their child-successors’ willingness and capability. In Study 3, we conducted a survey of 103 parent–child dyads in family firms in mainland China and found a U-shaped relationship between capability and coercive control only when incumbents’ roles in the family and at work were highly intertwined.