The Action Mechanism of the Service-Oriented Leadership on Abusive Supervision: From the Perspective of the Moral Licensing Theory

Abstract

Abstract: The service-oriented leadership characterized by altruism, service and humility has received extensive attention from the academic circles. However, little attention has been paid to the deviant behaviors of the service-oriented leaders after their“warm-hearted”behaviors. Based on the moral licensing theory, this paper adopts the paired data of multiple time points to conduct a statistical analysis. The results show that service-oriented leadership can exert positive impact on abusive supervision through the mediation of psychological rights, and the behavioral consistency of leadership acts as a “valve”when the abusive supervision is spawned on the service-oriented leaders. When the behavioral consistency of leaders is higher, the service-oriented leaders will want to have more psychological rights and produce more abusive supervision. When the behavioral consistency of leaders is lower, the abusive supervision of service-oriented leaders produced through psychological rights will be relatively weakened. This research result has important reference value for the comprehensive understanding of the service-oriented leadership theory and the prevention of the negative effects of the service-oriented leadership.

Key words: service-oriented leadership, psychological rights, abusive supervision, behavioral consistency, the moral licensing theory

CLC Number:

F272.91

GAO Ri-guang, GUO Xiao-xiao, ZHENG Kai-xia. The Action Mechanism of the Service-Oriented Leadership on Abusive Supervision: From the Perspective of the Moral Licensing Theory[J]. Contemporary Finance & Economics, 2021, 0(1): 86-96.

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