Summary

The aim of current research is to investigate the association of abusive supervision with contextual performance in presence of LMX. In order to accomplish this aim, the quantitative study will be carried out and primary data will be obtained through survey. The data will be obtained from employees of manufacturing companies in London UK. The data will be analyzed using hierarchical regression and mediation process of Hayes. The study will be highly significant for theory and practice.

Introduction

The effective supervision has been recognized as an important factor in developing the high quality social system within organization and it can shape the overall relationship of employees and supervisors (Spitzmuller, Van Dyne and Ilies, 2008). The contemporary research has offered significant importance to the notion of abusive supervision and its consequent association with the behavior and performance of employees who are being mistreated. The abusive supervision has been defined as the insight of the subordinates about the supervision of the leader and is stated as the extent to which leader is involved in the verbal and non-verbal abusive behaviour (Tepper, 2000). Mostly, the occurrence of abusive supervision has been viewed within social context which provides that followers view the treatment of supervisor in comparison with relevant others with an aim of shaping their perceptions of supervisor’s treatment. It has been offered by the studies conducted in both actual and laboratory settings that awareness of supervisor’s treatment with co-workers act as a foundation of employee’s perceptions about the attributes of leader (Shoss et al., 2013).

The positivity of effective social networks within an organization can be helpful in enhancing the contextual performance of employees and can enhance helping behaviour towards peers (Liu and Wang, 2013). The abusive supervision is harmful in the organization and it damages the quality of social interactions of leaders and members and negative perceptions of victims about the leaders may contribute negatively to the contextual performance (Jiao, Richards and Zhang, 2011). Given the importance of issue and linkages among underlying variables, the researcher has proposed to conduct study on following issue.

1.Literature Review

2.1 Abusive Supervision and Contextual performance

Abusive supervision is considered as the continual display of aggressive and hostile behaviour which could either be verbal or no verbal. The aspects of ridiculing and yelling at the subordinates also comes under the abusive supervision and most of the studies have combined the effects of own and peer’s abusive supervision within social context (Hoobler and Brass, 2006). The theoretical underpinnings of abusive supervision are derived from organizational justice theory (interactional dimension) which lay emphasis on the fairness of treatment with followers. The abusive supervision contributes to violate the interpersonal fairness perceptions of employees as they are mistreated by higher authorities (Tepper, Duffy, Henle and Lambert, 2006). The prosocial behaviour of employees is considered as an important outcome of high quality leader member exchange as the high LMX members are likely to receive greater privilege than low LMX individuals (Hobman et al., 2009). The prosocial behaviour is synonymous with contextual performance that can be defined as the tendency of employees to engage in activities and responsibilities beyond their prescribed job description (Harris, Kacmar and Zivnuska, 2007). The employee with high contextual performance are likely to put extra efforts for wellbeing of the organization.

The workers who receive respectful treatment from their supervisors are likely to feel obliged towards organization and they are willing to perform beyond the expected job responsibilities (Harvey et al., 2007). The perspective of reciprocity of norms can be linked with the notion that abusive supervision belittle employees in the organization and in turn employees reduce their prosocial behavior towards organization as the reaction of abusive supervision.  Likewise, it is also important to note that presence of abusive supervision can restrict the access of employees to resources which are needed to effectively perform at job (Liu, Kwong, Wu and Wu, 2010). Therefore, the contextual performance may suffer in presence of abusive supervision.

H1: Abusive supervision will be negatively associated with contextual performance of employees.

2.2 Abusive Supervision and Leader member exchange

The origin of abusive supervision from organizational justice has suggested that fairness in treatm