Impact of Abusive Supervision on the Knowledge Worker Productivity: through the lens of Knowledge Management process

Abstract

The dynamic nature of creative tasks and ongoing competition among the organizations calls for the knowledge workers to perform innovatively in the tasks in this age of technology. Knowledge and knowledge workers being an asset, should be dealt accordingly by the organizations. The supervisor-employee relationship plays an important role in order to overcome the upcoming challenge of enhancing the knowledge worker productivity. Moreover, the process by which the knowledge is circulated in the organization also plays an important role. Furthermore, the banking sector work creatively to deal with critical risk management and other regulatory tasks under the national and international pressure. Therefore, the study explains the impact of abusive supervision on the knowledge worker productivity through knowledge management process in the Banking sector of Pakistan. The purpose of the study is to analyze this behavior and probe into the effects on the productivity of the knowledge worker through the mediating role of knowledge management process. The data for this questionnaire based quantitative study is collected from the Pakistani Banking Sector via purposive sampling technique, the sample size is 204. Furthermore, the study helps to fill the existing gaps in the literature in the field of knowledge management and abusive supervision, while paving the path for the practitioners to overcome the underlying challenges in the modern world organizations. The data of the cross-sectional quantitative study is analyzed through using IBM SPSS v.26 and Process Macro, whereas the Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is conducted through AMOS v. 26. The research study showed the negative impact abusive supervision on one of the most important aspect of knowledge economy, i.e., knowledge worker productivity, through the knowledge management processes, that is Knowledge Creation, Knowledge sharing and Knowledge Application, whereas there prevails a positive link between the knowledge worker productivity and knowledge management process. The research work proves the fact that whenever the manager is abusive it becomes difficult for the knowledge worker to coordinate and communicate among one another efficiently and effectively, and hence the productivity is hampered.