Mindy Michelle Shoss

Blaming the Organization for Abusive Supervision: The Roles of Perceived Organizational Support and Supervisor's Organizational Embodiment

Why do employees who experience abusive supervision retaliate against the organization? We apply organizational support theory to propose that employees hold the organization partly responsible for abusive supervision. Depending on the extent to which employees identify the supervisor with the organization (i.e., supervisors organizational embodiment), we expected abusive supervision to be associated with low perceived organizational support (POS) and consequently with retribution against the organization. Across 3 samples, we found that abusive supervision was associated with decreased POS as moderated by supervisors organizational embodiment. In turn, reduced POS was related to heightened counterproductive work behavior directed against the organization and lowered in-role and extra-role performance. These findings suggest that employees partly attribute abusive supervision to negative valuation by the organization and, consequently, behave negatively toward and withhold positive contributions to it.

Understanding Employee Responses to Stressful Information Security Requirements: A Coping Perspective

We use coping theory to explore an underlying relationship between employee stress caused by burdensome, complex, and ambiguous information security requirements (termed security-related stress or SRS) and deliberate information security policy (ISP) violations. Results from a survey of 539 employee users suggest that SRS engenders an emotion-focused coping response in the form of moral disengagement from ISP violations, which in turn increases ones susceptibility to this behavior. Our multidimensional view of SRS—comprised of security-related overload, complexity, and uncertainty—offers a new perspective on the workplace environment factors that foster noncompliant user behavior and inspire cognitive rationalizations of such behavior. The study extends technostress research to the information systems security domain and provides a theoretical framework for the influence of SRS on user behavior. For practitioners, the results highlight the incidence of SRS in organizations and suggest potential mechanisms to counter the stressful effects of information security requirements.

Suffering in Silence: Investigating the Role of Fear in the Relationship Between Abusive Supervision and Defensive Silence

Drawing from an approach-avoidance perspective, we examine the relationships between subordinates perceptions of abusive supervision, fear, defensive silence, and ultimately abusive supervision at a later time point. We also account for the effects of subordinates assertiveness and individual perceptions of a climate of fear on these predicted mediated relationships. We test this moderated mediation model with data from three studies involving different sources collected across various measurement periods. Results corroborated our predictions by showing (a) a significant association between abusive supervision and subordinates fear, (b) second-stage moderation effects of subordinates assertiveness and their individual perceptions of a climate of fear in the abusive supervision-fear-defensive silence relationship (with lower assertiveness and higher levels of climate-of-fear perceptions exacerbating the detrimental effects of fear resulting from abusive supervision), and (c) first-stage moderation effects of subordinates assertiveness and climate-of-fear perceptions in a model linking fear to defensive silence and abusive supervision at a later time. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

PERMA: a model for institutional leadership and culture change.

For those who work and learn in medical schools and teaching hospitals to develop their full potential, fundamental institutional culture change needs to occur. Far too many medical students, residents, faculty, and staff not only fail to reach their potential but also suffer unnecessarily from anxiety, burnout, and depression related to the unhealthy environment in which they work. Too often, programs that address these problems are directed primarily at treating distressed individuals and fail to look at the workplace environment as a significant source of distress. Systematic efforts, spearheaded by forward-thinking institutional leadership, are needed to create healthier workplace cultures and thereby prevent mental health problems.

Social Media: Social Intelligence Training Module

Introduction Physicians’ posts on social media have the potential to impact the patient-physician relationship, interpersonal relationships at work, institutions’ reputations, and the publics trust in health care professionals. Empirical research, along with several very public cases of unprofessional behavior by physicians on social media, suggests that resident physicians are not always aware of the implications of their actions online. Residency programs are being charged with ways to model positive online presence. The goal of this project was to develop a social media training program that emphasized perspective taking and fostered appropriate social media use. Methods This training program involves an interactive lecture and discussion, with approximately 20 minutes of content, 20 minutes of small-group discussion, and 10 minutes of large-group discussion. We evaluated the effectiveness of this program by asking participants to complete presession and postsession surveys of social media knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Results Survey responses (N = 16) suggest that the social media training program was successful. Participants demonstrated an increase in knowledge of social media policies, ability to identify potentially inappropriate media interactions, ability to identify appropriate responses to such interactions, and understanding of how their actions on social media affect others. Discussion We believe that the social media module is an effective and useful tool for members of the medical community as the internet and social media continue to grow in popularity and lines between professional and personal realms are continually blurred. While the effectiveness of this program was established with first-year pediatric residents, the module material is applicable to a broader medical audience.