Investigating the Relationship between Third Parties’ Witnessing Abusive Supervision and Their Performance Improvement
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Abstract
Management researchers have begun to explore the effect of abusive supervision on third-party employees. Based on the self-motives framework, we hypothesized that witnessing abusive supervision could increase feedback seeking among third-party employees, particularly among those with high self-monitoring traits, leading to improved performance. We obtained 1,098 observations from 139 military employees across 10 working days using a time-lagged experience sampling method. We tested our hypotheses using multilevel path analysis and the Monte Carlo method. We found that daily witnessing of abusive supervision was positively associated with daily feedback seeking, which was positively associated with improved daily performance among third-party employees. Furthermore, third parties with a higher level of self-monitoring are more likely to seek daily feedback and improve performance after witnessing daily abusive supervision of a coworker, compared with those with a lower level of self-monitoring. This paper outlines the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.
