How abusive supervision ultimately might enhance performance ratings among silent, neurotic employees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose With a theoretical anchoring in the conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study investigates how employees' exposure to abusive supervision ultimately might lead to enhanced supervisor ratings of their job performance because employees react with defensive silence. Employees' neuroticism also might catalyze this process. Design/methodology/approach Multi-source, three-wave data were collected from employees and their supervisors in the power-distant, collectivistic country of Pakistan. Findings Beliefs about the presence of verbally abusive leaders, somewhat ironically, mitigate the risk of diminished supervisor-rated performance evaluations to the extent that those beliefs prompt employees to engage in self-protective behaviors to avoid confrontations with the abusive leaders. This mediating role of defensive silence is invigorated to the extent that employees' personalities make them more sensitive to stressful work situations. Practical implications For practitioners, this study identifies self-protective silence as a key, potentially worrisome mechanism that employees in power-distant, collectivistic countries may use to avoid negative performance ratings by leaders they perceive as abusive, and it reveals how this process tends to vary across different employees. Originality/value This research cites a critical, unexplored factor through which verbally abused employees can avoid negative performance evaluations, by engaging in defensive silence, not only as a potentially detrimental solution but also as an effective short-term solution. It further clarifies that this process is more likely to occur among neurotic employees.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".