Power Imbalance and Employee Silence: The Role of Abusive Leadership, Power Distance Orientation, and Perceived Organisational Politics

Abstract

Employee silence is a costly but omnipresent phenomenon in modern organisations. In this study, we focus on two forms of silence: defensive silence based on fear and acquiescent silence based on resignation. Given the power imbalance in supervisor-subordinate relationships, we hypothesise that abusive supervision is an antecedent of subordinates' defensive silence and that a subordinate's power distance orientation affects acquiescent silence. We investigate the interaction effects of abusive supervision and power distance orientation on these two types of silence. Perceived organisational politics may also aggravate such interactive effects. Based on data collected from 159 junior employees in China in two periods, we find that abusive supervision is associated with employee defensive silence and moderates high-powerdistance employees' tendency to engage in acquiescent silence. When perceiving high politics in the organisation, high-power-distance employees are more sensitive to abusive supervision and engage in more defensive silence. A highly political organisational context also accentuates abusive supervision's moderating effect on the relation between employees' power distance orientation and acquiescent silence. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications for the silence literature.

International differences in employee silence motives: Scale validation, prevalence, and relationships with culture characteristics across 33 countries

“…Studies that applied the social scientific approach to examine the role of ethnic cultural factors regarding silence (or voice; e.g., Botero & Van Dyne, 2009;Lam & Xu, 2019;Rhee et al, 2014) focused on one or two out of potentially manifold characteristics supposed to differentiate cultures (see Lytle et al, 1995;Taras et al, 2009). Applying a more comprehensive approach, we draw upon a systematic and widely examined typology of culture, namely, the GLOBE framework (House et al, 2004).…”

Silent Counterattack: The Impact of Workplace Bullying on Employee Silence

“…The existing antecedent research on ES mainly focuses on leadership style (such as abusive leadership, authoritarian leadership, and destructive leadership), personality traits (such as selfesteem, proactive personality, and regulatory focus), and other aspects (Pinder and Harlos, 2001;Duan et al, 2018;Karabay et al, 2018;Lam and Xu, 2019). However, the studies on the impact of negative events in organizational factors are still sparse.…”

Exploring Influence Mechanism of Abusive Supervision on Subordinates’ Work Incivility: A Proposed Framework

“…Tepper (2007) found some covert behaviour exhibited by the subordinates against supervisors, such as ignoring the supervisor’s request, putting less effort on assigned tasks or withholding citizenship behaviours that might benefit the supervisor. These findings are related to studies of work incivility that demonstrate that less powerful employees prefer to revenge against more powerful employees in subtle ways, such as deteriorating perpetrator’s reputation or reducing their productivity (Pearson et al, 2000) or sometimes acquiescent silence based on deeply held resignation (Lam & Xu, 2019).…”