Title: Social undermining and organisational attitudes: the moderating role of personality traits

Authors: Vahid Yousefian Arani; Marjan Fayyazi

Addresses: Department of Human Resource Management, Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran ' Department of Human Resource Management, Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: Social undermining is an interpersonal insidious misbehaviour and is significantly associated with employee's outcomes if it repeats over time. The purpose of this article is to investigate the impact of social undermining (SU) on employee's attitudes including organisational commitment (OC), job satisfaction (JS) and job involvement (JI). Moreover, we study the moderating role of personality traits including conscientiousness and neuroticism, on the impact of SU on job attitudes. Regression analysis was used to analyse the data collected from 158 questionnaires completed by employees in an Iranian public institution. Results show that SU by co-workers and supervisors has a considerable effect on employee's job attitudes. The main contribution of the paper is that we found conscientiousness has a moderating role on the effect of SU on OC, affective commitment, normative commitment and JI, and neuroticism has a moderating role on the effect of SU on normative commitment and JS.

Keywords: social undermining; organisational attitudes; job satisfaction; organisational commitment; job involvement; personality traits; neuroticism; conscientiousness.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBGE.2022.123684

International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, 2022 Vol.16 No.3, pp.355 - 375

Accepted: 08 Apr 2021
Published online: 30 Jun 2022 *

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