Cyberloafing to Escape From the "Devil": Investigating the Impact of Abusive Supervision From the Third-Party Perspective

Xuedong Liang; Gengxuan Guo; Qunxi Gong; Sipan Li; Ziyang Li

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.722063

Cyberloafing to Escape From the "Devil": Investigating the Impact of Abusive Supervision From the Third-Party Perspective

Front Psychol. 2022 Feb 4:12:722063. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.722063. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Xuedong Liang^{1

2}, Gengxuan Guo¹, Qunxi Gong^{1

2}, Sipan Li¹, Ziyang Li¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Business, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China.
² The Economy and Enterprise Development Institute, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China.

Abstract

Purpose: Previous studies on cyberloafing focus on individual and organization factors, ignoring the situation of employes as the event observers. Drawing on affective events theory (AET), the present study proposed a theoretical model for the relationships among peer abusive supervision, negative affectivity, cyberloafing, and hostile attribute bias, which aims to bridge the above research gap.

Methodology: Multiwave data of 355 employes from 8 service-oriented companies in Southwest China supported our model. Time-lag method and critical incident techniques were introduced during the data collection stage. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and bootstrapping method were employed for hypothesis test.

Findings: The empirical results indicated that peer abusive supervision was positively related to third party's cyberloafing, and the third party's negative affectivity plays a mediating role among the above relationships. In addition, the third party's hostile attribution bias moderated the mediating role of third party's negative affectivity. Specifically, the effect of peer abusive supervision on third party's negative affectivity and the mediating effect of this negative affectivity were stronger when the third party's hostile attribution bias was higher.

Originality: Drawing on AET, the current study constructed a process model of third party's cyberloafing reactions to peer abusive supervision, which helps explain the affective mechanism and the boundary conditions of the above "events-affectivity-behavior" path. Our model is a positive response to previous scholars' calls for research of abusive supervision from multiple perspectives. Meanwhile, the current study explored the antecedent variable of cyberloafing from the perspective of event observers, which provides a theoretical basis for follow-up-related research. Thirdly, this study further expanded the theoretical boundaries of AET.

Keywords: affective events theory; cyberloafing; hostile attribution bias; negative affectivity; peer abusive supervision.