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Not much is known about the conditions under which the negative relationship between co-worker undermining and employee outcomes may wax or wane. This study seeks to address this issue by analysing the role of leadership in mitigating the negative impact of co-worker undermining on employee outcomes. Drawing on expectancy violation theory (EVT), the study proposes that servant leadership will alleviate the association between co-worker undermining, emotional exhaustion and consequently organisational commitment.

Two-wave time-lagged data were collected from a sample of 345 nurses working under 33 supervisors in a large public hospital in Malaysia. To account for the nested nature of the data, generalised multilevel structural equation modeling (GSEM) in STATA was used to test the hypotheses.

After controlling for transformational leadership, co-worker undermining was indirectly related to organisational commitment via emotional exhaustion, and this indirect relationship was weaker when servant leadership was high.

Organisations need to invest in interventions that help reduce co-worker undermining and put emphasis on promoting servant leadership.

The study extends the literature by introducing EVT as a new theoretical lens to analyse the consequences of co-worker undermining on employee outcomes. The study also addresses calls for research on the role of leadership in ameliorating the negative consequences of co-worker undermining.

By integrating affective events theory and insights from the displaced aggression literature, the purpose of this paper is to highlight that state hostility can serve as an explanation for how perceived undermining by co-workers leads to antagonistic consequences. Distress tolerance and organizational identification are theorized to moderate the hypothesized relationships that are investigated in this study.

PROCESS macro developed by Hayes (2013) was used to test all the hypotheses by using time-lagged, multi-source data collected from 218 Chinese employees associated with the service industry.

The paper finds that state hostility seems to trigger unethical behavior on the part of employees resulting in service sabotage. It is concluded that perceptions of undermining are positively linked to employees’ hostility, which in turn drive service sabotage behavior. Furthermore, employee distress tolerance weakens the effects of perceived undermining on employees’ state hostility, while organizational identification alleviates the effect of employees’ hostility on service sabotage behavior.

This study not only highlights the outcomes of perceived coworker undermining, the mechanism through which it occurs, and the moderating effects of given factors, but also provides insights to the organizations for managing service sector employees so that they can more effectively interact with customers. The findings suggest that employees with high organizational identification are less involved in service sabotage, thus, such measures are necessary to take which help employers to enhance employees’ organizational identification. The authors also suggest managers to clearly communicate the adverse consequences which employees could have to face if they exhibit unethical behavior.

This study addresses the question: when and how perceived coworker undermining affects customers’ services. To date, most of the existing literature considered customers’ negative event and customers’ mistreatment as an antecedent of employees’ service sabotage. However, this study concluded that these are not the only reasons for employees’ service sabotage, employees’ interpersonal mistreatment which occurred beyond customers’ interaction also causes service sabotage.

In the last decade, researchers have suggested relationships between negative mentoring (NM) and undesirable work interactions, termed co-worker undermining. Existing evidence has shown that both NM and group identity positively influence this set of negative co-worker behaviors. The purpose of this paper is to expand the domain by including two additional influences, such as newcomer’s learning (T1) as a mediator between NM (T1) and co-worker undermining (T2), and (low and high) group identity moderation (T1).

The authors collected time-separated data, with a final sample of 303 employees of various Spanish organizations.

As hypothesized, the results indicate that newcomer’s learning mediates the relationships between NM and co-worker undermining. The conditional effect of newcomer’s learning was strong and significant at lower levels of group identity, and it was weaker and non-significant when group identity was higher. Thus, the mediated moderation analyses performed support the study’s main hypothesis.

Because of the self-reported approach, the results can be affected by common method variance. But the design with time-separated data enables stronger confidence in the inferences drawn from the study than permitted by a cross-sectional study design.

The paper includes implications for employee’s careers and for counseling practitioners.

This paper is relevant because it shows that group identification can protect newcomers from the consequences of negative events during the organizational entry phase. Additionally, practitioners could design more efficient intervention programs by taking novice employees’ affective experiences into account. Organizational and societal leaders may be well-served by knowledge about preventing both NM and co-worker undermining in order to protect newcomers from the destructive consequences linked to such relationships.

This paper focusses on a dysfunctional personnel situation, as co-worker undermining, in order to clarify their links with organizational and group processes. The existing research has tended to address NM, organizational socialization, co-worker undermining and group identification as separate phenomena. In contrast, this study is intended as a first step toward integrating the results of these processes, which interact in a series of complex relations.

This study aims to investigate the effect of social undermining on the service employees' boundary-spanning behavior though perceived fit with job (P-J fit). This study also aims to examine the moderating role of ethical climate in the relationship between service employees' perceived fit with job (P-J fit) and boundary-spanning behavior.

Using a sample of 469 Korean bank and insurance employees, research model and hypotheses were tested. Data analysis was performed using structural equation modeling and the hierarchical regression model.

The results showed that supervisor and co-worker undermining have detrimental influences on the service employee's perceived fit with job. P-J fit has a positive effect on employees' boundary-spanning behavior and this relationship was positively moderated by the employee's prevailing perception of organizational practices and procedures that have ethical content.

This research should be evaluated in light of limitations, one of which is the reliance on cross-sectional data. The generalizability of this research model across settings and across outcome variables is still an open question. The measures of social undermining were based on participant perceptions, and in each case, participants make judgments about their negative behaviors retrospectively. Furthermore, the data were collected in Korea, so generalizing the hypothesized model beyond this setting is limited. Since Korea represents a distinct cultural and economic context, future research could examine the model in different countries.

The findings of this study confirm the crucial role of managers in creating an ethical climate where decisions are based on formally stated ethical guidelines. Such guidelines help service employees solve the ethical dilemmas that are common to their positions. These research findings demonstrate that creating an ethical climate is not only the right thing to do but also has significant benefits for both the service employees and the organization.

Considering the boundary-spanning role of the service employee, not only the organizational side (supervisor and co-worker undermining), but also the customer is specified as a major source of social undermining.

This study aims to unpack the link between co-worker incivility and job performance, by detailing a mediating role of psychological detachment and a moderating role of psychological capital.

The research hypotheses are tested with three-wave, time-lagged data collected from Pakistani-based employees and their supervisors.

An important reason that disrespectful co-worker treatment curtails job performance, with respect to both in-role and extra-role work efforts, is that employees detach from their work environment. This mediating role of psychological detachment is less salient to the extent that employees possess high levels of psychological capital.

For organizations, this study pinpoints a key mechanism, a propensity to distance oneself from work, by which convictions that co-workers do not show respect direct employees away from productive work activities. This study also shows how this mechanism can be subdued by ensuring that employees exhibit energy-enhancing personal resources.

This study expands extant research on the dark side of interpersonal co-worker relationships by revealing pertinent factors that explain why and when co-worker incivility can escalate into diminished performance-enhancing activities.

This study empirically tests the impact of the Dark Triad personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) and co-worker competitiveness on knowledge sabotage.

A model was constructed and tested by means of Partial Least Squares with data from 150 participants recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

The individual personality traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy are significant predictors of individual knowledge sabotage behavior, whereas co-worker Machiavellianism and psychopathy trigger co-worker knowledge sabotage. Out of the three Dark Triad traits, individual and co-worker psychopathy emerged as the strongest knowledge sabotage predictor. Co-worker competitiveness has a positive effect on co-workers’ knowledge sabotage behavior. There is a relatively strong relationship between co-worker and individual knowledge sabotage which suggests that knowledge sabotage is a form of contagious workplace behavior. Individuals underestimate their negative behavior and traits and/or overestimate those of their fellow co-workers.

Managers should realize that the Dark Triad personality traits could predispose certain individuals to engage in extremely harmful counterproductive knowledge behavior. They need to ensure that individuals with these traits are not hired or are identified during their probation periods. It is recommended that organizations include knowledge sabotage measures in their periodic employee surveys. Organizations should help their employees objectively re-evaluate their own traits and knowledge behavior as well as those of their colleagues to ensure that their reciprocating knowledge behavior is more aligned with the reality in their organization.

This study offers a reliable and valid quantitative survey instrument to measure the presence of knowledge sabotage.

An individual's human capital has a strong influence in earnings. Yet, individual worker‐level estimations of earnings rarely include the characteristics of co‐workers or detailed firm‐level controls. In particular, co‐workers skills are ignored which may be particularly significant where team work is important. This paper utilises a unique matched work‐place data set to estimate the effect on the earnings of co‐workers' education and training in the Hotel and Catering sector, which contains a high proportion of low paying establishments and in the Retail sector which contains a large absolute number of low paying establishments. The data are derived from the 1998 British Workplace Employment Relations Survey. This is a national sample based on interviews with managers in 2,191 establishments with at least ten workers. In addition, a survey of up to 25 randomly selected employees in each establishment was undertaken which included questions on education, training, pay and job satisfaction, as well as a range of other personal and workplace characteristics. We have, therefore, a matched workplace employee sample which is essential for this type of analysis. The results suggest that there are strong co‐worker effects in the earnings of individuals when controlling the individual's own level of education. While there are also high returns to training for individual workers, there are no similar spillover effects from the training of co‐workers in these sectors. Nevertheless, this suggests that there could well be a pay‐off to the professionalisation of service sector jobs.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of workplace happiness and work engagement on employee service innovative behavior from the perspective of positive psychology. The study also examines if work engagement mediates the relationship between workplace happiness and employee service innovative behavior. Finally, it investigates how co-worker socializing and the service climate of the organization moderate the relationship between work engagement and employee service innovative behavior.

The study used survey data from 321 frontline employees working in the service sector in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Six major hypotheses were established and examined using the SPSS Statistics V22.0 Process. The measurement model was analyzed using Amos 22.

Workplace happiness and work engagement are found to be important factors affecting employee service innovative behavior. Workplace happiness influences employee service innovative behavior directly and indirectly through work engagement. Both service climate and co-worker socializing play a significant moderating role in the relationship between work engagement and employee service innovative behavior among frontline employees. Interestingly, service climate erodes this relationship while co-worker socializing enhances it.

This study provides guidelines for managers and practitioners in the service industry to promote frontline employee service innovative behavior. Specifically, the findings provide guidance for decision-makers on how to use workplace happiness to trigger the innovative service behaviors of frontline employees, taking into consideration the conditional role of service climate and co-worker socializing.

The literature on factors affecting the service innovative behavior of frontline employees in the service sector from the perspective of positive psychology is limited, especially in the context of the UAE. The data, framework and outcomes of this research address this gap and contribute to the current body of knowledge. Specifically, the study contributes to the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions in the field of positive psychology by validating the applicability of the theory in a wider organizational context.

Drawing on social identity theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether social undermining significantly influences employee voice (or silence) and organizational deviant behavior in the hotel industry regarding three types of social undermining: by supervisor, coworker and customer.

The study provided a self-administered questionnaire to 344 five-star hotel employees in South Korea. SPSS (version 22.0) and AMOS (version 20.0) were used to analyze the data.

Being undermined by customers negatively affects employee voice and positively affects employee silence. Supervisor and coworker undermining also negatively affects employee voice and positively affects employee silence. Employee voice does not significantly affect organizational deviant behavior, but employee silence significantly affects deviant employee behavior. This was also verified by the potential mediating effect of supervisor undermining on silence as a form of deviant employee behavior.

This study contributes to the development of long-term manager-centered measures to combat the effect of social undermining among frontline employees in the hotel industry. It can be difficult to differentiate clearly between the conflicts and stress experienced by employees at the service frontline and the social undermining they experience during diverse social interactions. In confirming the effects of social undermining on employees at a five-star hotel, the study also found no clear organizational provisions or legal recourse for victims. The findings suggest that hotel employees are easily exposed to social undermining as a result of the industry culture and socialization process.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship perceived employability (the employee's perception about available job opportunities in the external labour market) and performance, accounting for felt job insecurity. Performance is conceptualized broadly in terms of optimal functioning (i.e. in-role performance and helping behaviour) and malfunctioning (i.e. organizational and interpersonal counterproductive work behaviour).

Survey data were collected among 433 Romanian workers.

The authors hypothesize and demonstrate that perceived employability relates positively to optimal functioning, but less so when workers feel insecure: highly employable workers may be high achievers, but withdraw from the organization when they feel insecure. Furthermore, the authors hypothesize that perceived employability relates positively to malfunctioning, the more so when workers feel insecure. Highly employable workers may care less about organizational norms, particularly when they see reasons to violate these norms: felt job insecurity may be such a reason. However, the interaction between perceived employability and felt job insecurity was not significantly related to malfunctioning. Instead, the authors established a main effect of perceived employability on both organizational and interpersonal counterproductive work behaviour.

The paper concludes that perceived employability contributes to optimal functioning when workers feel secure, but it may also bring along some costs in the form of malfunctioning.