Abusive supervision and customer-oriented organizational citizenship behavior: The roles of hostile attribution bias and work engagement

We examined the relationship between abusive supervision and hospitality employees’ customer-oriented organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Employing the conservation of resources theory, we explain the mediating role of work engagement. We further examine the moderating role of hostile attribution bias in exacerbating the abusive supervision and work engagement relationship. Using time-lagged data from 12 hotels in China, we found that abusive supervision negatively affected service employees’ customer-oriented OCB by undermining work engagement. In addition, our findings indicated that hostile attribution bias strengthened the direct effect of abusive supervision on work engagement and the indirect effect of abusive supervision on customer-oriented OCB via work engagement such that the relationships were stronger when hostile attribution bias was high rather than low. The theoretical and managerial implications of these results are discussed.