Political context matters: a joint effect of coercive power and perceived organizational politics on abusive supervision and silence

Abusive supervision is a manifestation of power and can lead to serious negative consequences for employees. Drawing upon the approach-inhibition theory of power, we examine how supervisors' coercive power affects abusive supervision, an approach behavior, and how subordinates then respond to abusive supervision in the form of silence, an inhibition-related behavior. More importantly, recognizing that exercises of and reactions to power may depend on the political environment of an organization, we also investigate the moderating role perceptions of organizational politics (POPs) play in these relationships. Using multi-source time-lagged data collected from 188 supervisor-subordinate dyads in Taiwan, we found a positive main effect of supervisors' coercive power on abusive supervision and further showed an accentuating moderating effect of supervisors' POPs on this relationship such that the relationship was only significant when supervisors' POPs were high. Moreover, while the abusive supervision - subordinate silence relationship was not significant, different from our prediction, we found a somewhat unexpected moderating effect of subordinates' POPs on this relationship. Specifically, silence stayed relatively high regardless of the level of abusive supervision when subordinates' POPs were high whereas a negative relationship was observed for subordinates with low POPs. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed.