The Relationship between Workplace Ostracism, TMX, Task Interdependence, and Task Performance: A Moderated Mediation Model

Background: Social interactions among employees are essential for individual performance as they provide various job-related information and feedback as well as social and emotional support. Tasks have become interdependent among organizational members, allowing teamwork to generally become an organizational norm. Consequently, it is pertinent that employees maintain favorable working relationships with other organizational members because workplace ostracism has become an organizational concern. Although recent studies have examined numerous psychological mechanisms that associate ostracism with workplace outcomes, studies have been limited in exploring practical facets that link the relationship. Thus, this study examined the mediating effect of team-member exchange for workplace ostracism and task performance and the moderating effect of task interdependence in influencing the relationship.Methods: Data were collected using a two-wave design and sampled 242 full-time employees in South Korea. The hypotheses were tested with hierarchical regression analyses.Results: Team-member exchange was found to mediate the relationship between workplace ostracism and task performance and task interdependence moderated the mediated relationship.Conclusions: The results suggest that being ostracized negatively influences the quality of the relationship between team-members which then affects individual performance. In addition, the conditional indirect effect for ostracism on task performance was significant when task interdependence was high, while not significant when it was low, thus moderating the mediated relationship.