Vicarious abusive supervision among restaurant frontline employees: the role of employee industry tenure

Vicarious abusive supervision (VAS) has recently garnered the attention of hospitality researchers. VAS is prevalent in hospitality work settings characterized by long production chains and open operating environments. Based on the conservation of resources (CORs) theory, this study aims to examine how VAS influences hospitality employees’ work behaviours (i.e. supervisor-directed deviance, silence and helping behaviour) via affective rumination, with the moderating role of industry tenure as an individual contingency on the relationship between VAS and affective rumination.

The data were gathered from 233 restaurant frontline employees and their supervisors in Turkey. The authors tested the proposed model using partial least squares method through SmartPLS 3.

The results reveal that VAS triggers affective rumination, which, in turn, is positively related to supervisor-directed deviance and silence, and negatively related to helping behaviour. Moreover, industry tenure, as a buffer resource, significantly moderates the relationship between VAS and affective rumination.

To reduce the occurrence of VAS and mitigate its negative effects, managers should establish a work environment that embraces understanding and respect, pay attention to how they communicate with employees, implement appropriate interventions when VAS occurs and conduct stress management training and improve employees’ emotion regulation skills in ways that correspond to the employees’ industry experience.

This study advances research on VAS by offering insight into how VAS impacts employees’ work behaviours via the underlying mechanism of affective rumination through a COR lens. The findings also shed light on the salient buffering effect of industry tenure as an individual contingency.