| dc.description.abstract | Social issues are a frequent topic of discussion in organizations today. Given that many employees view their organizations as a place to initiate change on such issues, recent work has examined how employees sell social issues to top management in an effort to garner organizational support for addressing these matters. However, we lack an understanding of what occurs when these discussions take place between employees themselves, particularly between supervisors and their subordinates. The purpose of this dissertation, then, is to provide a theoretical and empirical examination of how supervisors respond when they are the target of subordinates’ social issue advocacy. By integrating the followership perspective of leadership with a regulatory focus lens to examine this area, my dissertation makes key contributions to this nascent literature on social issues in the workplace.
First, my dissertation addresses when social issue discussions occur at work by looking at social issue advocacy, or when subordinates pressure their supervisors to address social issues at work. Whereas most research has viewed supervisors as the proponents for change regarding social issues, it remains unclear what occurs when they are the targets of social issue advocacy. Second, this research contributes to our understanding of supervisors’ motivation for addressing social issues by understanding to whom they respond. It may be that supervisors address social issues at the urging of subordinates and account for subordinate characteristics (i.e., status and consensus) in evaluating how to respond. Finally, my dissertation extends our knowledge of why supervisors may address social issues at work. I propose two subordinate-focused motivating factors—anticipated gratitude and anticipated guilt—that guide the supervisor’s response to subordinate advocacy and ultimately may lead to supervisor championing social issues at work.
I performed two experimental vignette studies and one survey study to examine my model. In the experiments, the results showed that subordinate social issue advocacy is positively related to both anticipated gratitude and anticipated guilt. Moreover, subordinate status significantly moderated the effect of subordinate advocacy on anticipated guilt—whereby a supervisor experiences higher anticipated guilt when a higher-status subordinate engages in social issue advocacy. However, status did not significantly moderate the effect of subordinate advocacy on gratitude, and I did not find support for a conditional effect of consensus on either path. In the survey study of 100 supervisor-subordinate pairs, the results largely did not support my model. However, in an exploratory post-hoc analysis, I found support for the effect of supervisor perceptions of subordinate advocacy on anticipated gratitude and anticipated guilt. Moreover, these results showed that anticipated guilt significantly mediates the indirect effect of supervisor perceptions of subordinate advocacy on supervisor championing social issues at work.
Because most of the results did not support most of the hypotheses, I identify and describe methodological limitations that may have contributed to these outcomes. More specifically, I discuss the deficiencies of measuring consensus in the experimental vignette designs, as well as shortcomings with the sample, measures, and timing in the survey study. I then close by outlining future research directions, as well as practical implications for managers and organizations. | en_US |
