Taking Anger Home: Are Employees Who Experience Ostracism from Supervisors More Likely to Undermine Family Harmony? The Perspective of Anger Displacement

Abstract

Supervisor ostracism is commonplace in work settings. Previous studies have mainly focused on the influence of supervisor ostracism on employees’ work behavior and performance, while the impact of supervisor ostracism on employees’ family harmony has garnered less attention. Based on the affective events theory, we analyzed data collected from 3 time points and 343 employees in the Chinese context. We found that supervisor ostracism significantly undermines employee-family harmony, which is mediated by workplace anger. In addition, our study demonstrated that high emotional regulation alleviates the relationship between workplace anger and family undermining, reducing the destructive consequences for the family. Our results indicated that individual differences in emotional regulation are responsible for moderating the mediating effects of workplace ange between supervisor ostracism and family undermining, shedding light on future research directions and providing practical implications for solving work-family conflict.