The effect of abusive supervision on safety behaviour of Chinese underground miners: a multi-level moderated mediation analysis
ISSN: 1750-614X
Article publication date: 13 September 2021
Issue publication date: 25 November 2022
Abstract
Purpose
Prior research has suggested that abusive supervision has negative impacts on various work outcomes. However, little attention has been paid to the relationship between abusive supervision and employees’ safety behaviour. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to address these limitations by developing and testing a theoretically based conceptual model that explicitly considers the underlying mechanism and boundary condition of the relationship between abusive supervision and safety behaviour of underground coal miners in China.
Design/methodology/approach
At Time 1, the authors conducted a survey of 630 employees to assess their supervisors’ abusive leadership behaviours, their own power distance beliefs and their self-reflection. At Time 2, the authros sent questionnaires to the leaders and invited them to evaluate employees’ safety behaviour in the workplace. After cleaning the survey data, the authors tested our model using a multi-level analysis on a sample (n = 458) of underground miners across 96 coal mining sites in China.
Findings
The authors propose that abusive supervision decreases employees’ safety compliance/participation by reducing reflection but strengthening rumination. The authors further find that the linkage from abusive supervision to reflection/rumination to safety compliance/participation is affected by power distance.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, This is one of the first empirical studies to investigate the mediating effects of a deep cognitive processing variable – namely, self-reflection – and the moderating effects of power distance on the relationship between abusive supervision and safety behaviour.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation Projects of China (Grant No. 71904188), the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Funds of the Chinese Education Ministry (Grant No. 19YJC630203), the State Key Program of National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 19AGL030), the Social Science Research Funds of Jiangsu Province of China (19GLB014), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in China (Grant no. 2019CXNL07 and 2017XKQY087, 2020ZDPYSK02), Educational Scientific Planning Project of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. C-b/2016/01/22), and the Double First-Class Initiative Project for Cultural Evolution and Creation of China University of Mining and Technology (Grant no. 2018WHCC01 and 2018WHCC03/05).
Citation
Ye, X., Cai, S. and Wang, Z. (2022), "The effect of abusive supervision on safety behaviour of Chinese underground miners: a multi-level moderated mediation analysis", Chinese Management Studies, Vol. 16 No. 5, pp. 1124-1144. https://doi.org/10.1108/CMS-08-2020-0342
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited