Why Victimized Employees Become Less Engaged at Work: An Integrated Model for Testing the Mediating Role of Sleep Quality.

Youngeun Chu,Kiyoung Lee,Eung Il Kim

doi:10.3390/ijerph18168468

Youngeun Chu, Kiyoung Lee + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18168468

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Abstract

Recent studies have shown that workplace victimization is negatively related to work engagement. The explanations for the underlying mechanisms, however, are still in a nascent stage. Drawing on the limited resource theory of self-regulation and research on workplace aggression and sleep, we develop and test an integrated model, which explains that victimized employees may have impaired sleep quality and thus have less energy and be less likely to be engaged in their work. The results of logistic regression and structural equation modeling analyses of large-scale survey data collected from 90,272 employees across the years 2010, 2011, 2014, and 2017, indicate that workplace victimization is negatively related to sleep quality and subsequent workplace engagement, even controlling for alternative explanations—job insecurity and basic psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Our findings advance our knowledge on the detrimental consequences of workplace victimization and suggest that, while unmet basic psychological needs matter, impaired sleep quality is one reason why victimized employees find it difficult to engage at work.

Highlights

Workplaces often feature negative interpersonal interactions [1,2,3,4,5,6], such as coworker undermining [7,8], supervisor abuse [9,10], subordinate defiance [11,12], and customer mistreatment [13,14]
Victimized employees are deprived of a sense of ownership at work, are prevented from achieving goals, and feel isolated at work [38,86]. These studies increased our understanding of why victimized employees may lack work engagement, but we propose that impaired sleep quality is an additional explanatory mechanism
Our results show that the indirect effect via sleep on the victimization-work engagement link accounts for 7.80% of the total indirect effect and we found this effect above and beyond the three basic psychological needs and job insecurity

Summary

Introduction

Workplaces often feature negative interpersonal interactions [1,2,3,4,5,6], such as coworker undermining [7,8], supervisor abuse [9,10], subordinate defiance [11,12], and customer mistreatment [13,14]. Negative interpersonal experiences occur less frequently than positive interactions but have larger impacts on employee well-being, attitudes, and functioning (cf [15]). Researchers have long observed the consequences of what is broadly termed workplace victimization [16,17,18]. Researchers vary in their conceptualization of negative interactions at work and use different labels (see [18]). The definition is broad in that victimization can occur “when an employee’s well-being is harmed by an act of aggression” Aquino et al [16] (1999, p. 260) defined victimization as “an individual’s perception of having been exposed, either momentarily or repeatedly, to the aggressive acts of one or more other persons.” The definition is broad in that victimization can occur “when an employee’s well-being is harmed by an act of aggression”

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