From victim to saboteur Testing a moderated mediation model of perceived undermining, state hostility, and service sabotage

摘要

Purpose 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. Design/methodology/approach 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. Findings 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.