When does job dissatisfaction lead to deviant behaviour? The critical roles of abusive supervision and adaptive humour

Abstract

With a basis in conservation of resources theory, this study investigates the relationship between employees’ sense of job dissatisfaction and their engagement in deviant behaviour, as well as the moderating roles that their exposure to abusive leadership and possession of adaptive humour skills can play in this process. Based on two-way survey data collected from employees in Pakistan, the findings show that employees’ unhappy feelings about their job situations enhance the likelihood that they undertake negative behaviours that can harm their organization, especially when they suffer from abusive leadership or lack adaptive humour skills. The buffering effect of their adaptive humour on the positive relationship between job dissatisfaction and deviant behaviour is also particularly salient in the presence of abusive leadership. JEL Classification: D23, D91, M50

Abusive leadership and employee commitment nexus: Conservation of resources theory perspective

“…The toxic/abusive leadership is found to be dishonest, disrespectful, withholding information and so forth (De Clercq et al, 2020;Khan et al, 2020;Kim, 2020) that are the intangible or non-physical behaviors. Keeping a focus on banks, Asrar-Ul-Haq and Kuchinke (2016) revealed leadership styles affecting bank employee's performance especially laissez-faire leadership style having an adverse effect on the performance outcomes effectiveness, satisfaction, and extra effort.…”

“…A plethora of academic literature captures the positive leadership to be significantly affecting firms' success through people management (De Clercq et al, 2020;Kim, 2020;Lopez et al, 2020), however, more recently, a burgeoning interest from the researchers and management practitioners in exploring on the destructive side of leadership has been witnessed (Milosevic et al, 2020;Xia et al, 2019) mainly due to the fact that these ill practices (harassment, bullying and humiliation) exercised by toxic leaders not only harm employees' physical and emotional wellbeing but indirectly cause huge costs to organizations. Supervisor's mal-behavior for employees is generally depicted in verbal and non-verbal behaviors (Matos et al, 2018).…”

“…Organizational commitment depends on the way leaders direct their employees. Generally, leaders having offensive behaviors do not win respect for themselves and their followers due to having hostile behavior (De Clercq et al, 2020).…”

“…Therefore, leaders are believed to positively shape subordinates' work ethics and their work outcomes (Khan et al, 2020). However, there is a growing stream of research that delineates abusive leadership to be on the constant rise, adding to employees' mental distress and workplace deviance (Lopez et al, 2020) with calls from researchers (De Clercq et al, 2020;Khan et al, 2020;Lopez et al, 2020) to investigate contextual and cultural aspects along with other variables to understand the downside of unethical leadership on employee and organizational outcomes.…”

“…While corporations are persistently on the lookout to improve human resource practices to gain employee commitment (Alserhan & Shbail, 2020), unethical leadership approaches undermine employee positivity (De Clercq et al, 2020). Therefore, excessive negative supervisory behaviors and failure of organizations are strong pleas towards examining supervisory practices and the subsequent outcomes.…”