How and when does abusive supervision influence employees’ promotive and prohibitive voice?

In this study, we explore how and when abusive supervision may dampen two types of voice behavior: promotive and prohibitive voice. Drawing on social cognitive theory, we propose that employee voice self-efficacy (VSE) may mediate the negative relationships between abusive supervision and promotive/prohibitive voice. Furthermore, according to the conservation of resources theory, we argue that employees’ psychological resilience may buffer the negative indirect effects of abusive supervision on the two voice behaviors via follower VSE. Third, we propose that employees’ moral disengagement propensity (MDP) may attenuate the moderating effects of resilience, such that the buffering effects of resilience may occur only when MDP is low. We tested our conditional process model with time-lagged and multisource data collected from 656 employees and 99 supervisors in China. The results largely supported our hypotheses. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed.