Employee Silence Predicted by Abusive Leadership and Workplace Ostracism: Role of Employee Power Distance

Abstract

The proposed research aimed to examine abusive leadership and workplace ostracism as predictors of employee silence among school teachers in Sargodha, Pakistan. Studies further tend to examine the moderating role of power distance. Purposive sampling was employed to acquire the data. The research variables were quantified using the Abusive Supervision Scale (Mitchell & Ambrose, 2007), Workplace Exclusion Scale (Hitlan & Noel, 2009), Silence Scale (Van Dyne et al., 2003) and Power Distance Scale (Dorfman & Howell, 1988). Pearson correlation analysis revealed a significant relationship between abusive leadership, workplace ostracism, employee silence, and power distance. Results showed that abusive leadership, ostracism, silence, and power distance have a positive relationship with each other. The findings of linear regression revealed that abusive leadership, ostracism and power distance positively predicted employee silence. Moderation analysis revealed that power distance significantly moderated the relationship of abusive leadership and workplace ostracism with employee silence. The proposed research provides some recommendations and conclusions for future researchers who may be interested in examining the abuse that teachers experience in a high-power-distance culture that compels them to act silently.

Keywords

• Abusive leadership
• workplace ostracism
• employee silence
• power distance
• schoolteachers