Abusive Supervision and Employee’s Creative Performance: A Serial Mediation Model of Relational Conflict and Employee Silence

Many previous studies on creativity have focused on discovering positive factors to improve creativity and innovation performance from leader, individual, and organizational perspectives. However, research on factors that hinder creative performance was relatively insufficient. This study examines leaders’ behavior that hinders employees’ creative performance by focusing on abusive supervision. Based on the Korean employee context, our research model draws upon constructs of abusive supervision, relational conflict, employee silence, and creative performance to hypothesize serial mediation mechanisms connecting abusive supervision to creative performance. Using survey data of 555 Korean employees, we find that abusive supervision is negatively related to creative performance. We also find that both relational conflict and employee silence mediate the relationship between abusive supervision and employee creative performance. More importantly, our empirical analysis indicates that a serial mediation effect testing a dual coordination effect was identified in the process of the leader’s abusive supervision leading to employee’s creative performance. Although many previous studies were focused on a single medium effect in the relationship between leadership types and employee creativity, this study applied the serial mediation effects in the relationship to test a dual medium effect. We further addressed a more complex process to explain the path of reducing creative performance by supervisor abusive supervision. We conclude by discussing both theoretical and practical implications.