Project Details

A multi-wave Daily Diary Study of the Effects of Off-the-Job Experiences on Abusive Supervision. The Spillover Perspective

PI: Hussain Naeem

Col: Abdullah Almashayekhi

The work-related antecedents of abusive supervision are well known, but less is known about cross-domain antecedents, specifically how supervisors daily lives affect abusive supervision. Our study will aim to address this limitation by investigating common but heretofore overlooked supervisors daily off-the-job experiences that may influence their behavior at work. Specifically, we look at the role of supervisors daily recovery experiences. Our study will investigate that an incomplete or poor recovery occurring between leaving work one day and returning the next is a reliable predictor of next-day abusive supervision. From the perspective of the spillover theory, it will explain that a supervisors poor recovery experiences will spill over to provoke his/her next-day abusive behavior through the experience of start-of-workday negative mood. Finally, we will also examine that a good nights sleep diminishes the negative mood resulting from poor recovery experiences and consequently the incidence of next-day abusive supervisory behavior. We will hire/recruit participants for a multi-wave daily diary study from a company headquartered in Riyadh. We will approach the study participants through the companys Human Resource (HR) department. The HR director will help us and contact the full-time, mid-level managers and describe the study and the incentives for completing the study, for example, feedback about study results, coffee and movie coupons. We will collect our within-individual level variables at three time points (i.e., bedtime, morning, and evening) via handled computers for five consecutive days and collected unit level variables via the initial paper-and-pencil survey. Given the repeated nature of our research design, we will follow other studies that used an experience sampling or daily diary method and will employ the shortened versions of surveys to alleviate the response burden on participants and increase their response rates. We will ensure that our overall survey length reasonably captured our key constructs without imposing an undue response burden on our participants. Moreover, we will use the translation-back translation method to convert an English language survey into Chinese. To do so, we will enlist two Chinese bilingual professors to convert the surveys from English to Chinese independently. To conclude, our study will contribute to the limited research which explores the non-work related antecedents of abusive supervision. It will provide a more nuanced view of why and when supervisors poor recovery experiences during off-work hours lead to next-day abusive supervision.