What now? Defining capricious supervision and examining its impact on employee strain

IF 5.4 2区管理学 Q1 MANAGEMENT

Human Relations Pub Date : 2025-10-10 DOI:10.1177/00187267251379398

Soojung Han, Hyesoo (Hailey) Park, Joseph K. Kim, Kyle J. Emich

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Despite frequent anecdotal accounts and media portrayals of unpredictable and/or inconsistent leaders, scholarly understanding of such leadership remains limited, mostly due to ambiguity surrounding its conceptualization and operationalization. Rather than focusing on employees’ direct experiences with unpredictable and inconsistent leaders, prior research has primarily measured changes in specific leader behavior over time or the interactive effects of seemingly opposing leader behaviors. Yet, this is not the same as perceiving that a leader has a consistently erratic style. Here, we conceptualize and systematically operationalize capricious supervision , defined as an employee’s perception of their leader’s frequent changes in decisions and treatment toward them. Across three studies with five employee samples, we develop a scale of capricious supervision (Study 1) and establish its discriminant and predictive validity by differentiating it from abusive supervision, justice variability (Study 2), and ambivalent leadership (Study 3) and examining its impact on employee outcomes (Study 3). Grounded in the stressor-strain model, we find that employees experiencing capricious supervision perceive their work as uncertain and frustrating, leading to emotional exhaustion, poor sleep quality, and counterproductive work behavior. Together, we provide a clear understanding of capricious supervision as a distinct leadership style, opening a conversation on its role in the workplace.

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现在该做什么?定义反复无常的监督并检查其对员工压力的影响

尽管经常有轶事报道和媒体描述不可预测和/或不一致的领导人，但对这种领导的学术理解仍然有限，主要是由于其概念化和操作化的模糊性。先前的研究没有关注员工与不可预测和不一致的领导者的直接经历，而是主要衡量特定领导者行为随时间的变化，或者看似相反的领导者行为的互动效应。然而，这并不等同于认为领导者的风格一直不稳定。在这里，我们将反复无常的监督概念化并系统地操作化，反复无常的监督被定义为员工对领导者频繁改变决策和对待他们的方式的感知。通过对五名员工样本进行的三项研究，我们开发了一个反复无常的监督量表（研究1），并通过将其与滥用监督、正义变异性（研究2）和矛盾领导（研究3）区分开来，建立了其判别和预测效度，并检查了其对员工结果的影响（研究3）。基于压力-应变模型，我们发现，在反复无常的监管下，员工认为自己的工作不确定、令人沮丧，从而导致情绪衰竭、睡眠质量差和反生产行为。总之，我们提供了反复无常的监督作为一种独特的领导风格的清晰理解，开启了关于其在工作场所中的作用的对话。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Human Relations Multiple-

CiteScore

12.60

自引率

7.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Human Relations is an international peer reviewed journal, which publishes the highest quality original research to advance our understanding of social relationships at and around work through theoretical development and empirical investigation. Scope Human Relations seeks high quality research papers that extend our knowledge of social relationships at work and organizational forms, practices and processes that affect the nature, structure and conditions of work and work organizations. Human Relations welcomes manuscripts that seek to cross disciplinary boundaries in order to develop new perspectives and insights into social relationships and relationships between people and organizations. Human Relations encourages strong empirical contributions that develop and extend theory as well as more conceptual papers that integrate, critique and expand existing theory. Human Relations welcomes critical reviews and essays: - Critical reviews advance a field through new theory, new methods, a novel synthesis of extant evidence, or a combination of two or three of these elements. Reviews that identify new research questions and that make links between management and organizations and the wider social sciences are particularly welcome. Surveys or overviews of a field are unlikely to meet these criteria. - Critical essays address contemporary scholarly issues and debates within the journal''s scope. They are more controversial than conventional papers or reviews, and can be shorter. They argue a point of view, but must meet standards of academic rigour. Anyone with an idea for a critical essay is particularly encouraged to discuss it at an early stage with the Editor-in-Chief. Human Relations encourages research that relates social theory to social practice and translates knowledge about human relations into prospects for social action and policy-making that aims to improve working lives.