The Effect of Workplace Ostracism on Proactive Behavior: The Self-Verification Theory Perspective

Abstract

Employee proactive behavior and workplace ostracism have received increasing attention nowadays. Extant studies which have empirically tested the relationship between workplace ostracism and employee in-role behavior(e.g., job performance) or extra-role behavior(e.g., contextual performance and organizational citizenship behavior) mostly based on social exchange or social identity theory. Few studies have investigated the relation between workplace ostracism and employee proactive behavior. Drawing on the self-verification theory perspective, the present study aimed to examine the influence mechanism of workplace ostracism on employee proactive behavior, especially the mediating role of organization-based self-esteem and the moderating role of neuroticism.The participants of this study were 403 employee-supervisor dyads from three large engineering machinery manufacturing enterprises in Fujian province. Three waves of data collection with two-month intervals were conducted to reduce the potential common method bias. In the first-wave survey(T1), employees reported their neuroticism, conscientiousness, perceived workplace ostracism and demographic variables. In the second-wave survey(T2), employees who had completed first wave questionnaires were surveyed again and were required to rate their organizational-based self-esteem. In the third wave survey(T3), employees' supervisors were surveyed in order to obtain the employees' proactive behaviors. The final sample was 403 employee-supervisor dyads with a response rate of 49.75%. We conducted hierarchical regression modeling to test the hypotheses. Results showed that workplace ostracism was negatively related to organization-based self-esteem; organization-based self-esteem was positively related to employees' proactive behavior; workplace ostracism was negatively related to employees' proactive behavior and organization-based self-esteem fully mediated the relation between workplace ostracism and proactive behavior; neuroticism strengthened the relation between workplace ostracism and organization-based self-esteem, such that the higher the level of employee'sneuroticism, the stronger the negative relation between workplace ostracism and organization-based self-esteem. This study offers following major contributions. First, this study fills in the gap of the research on the relation between workplace ostracism and employee proactive behaviors, investigates the influence mechanism of workplace ostracism on employee proactive behavior and broadens the research on the antecedents of employee proactive behavior. Second, previous research often explored the effects of workplace ostracism on employee attitude and behavior from the social exchange theory or social identity theory perspective, this study explores the influence mechanism of workplace ostracism on employee proactive behavior based on selfverification theory, which broadens the research perspectives of the influence mechanism of workplace ostracism. Third, this study combines the moderating role of neuroticism and the mediating role of organizational-based self-esteem to explore the influence mechanism of workplace ostracism on employee proactive behavior, thus it contributes to understanding the black box between workplace ostracism and employee proactive behavior.