How Fear of External Threats Plays Roles: An Examination of Supervisors’ Trait Anger, Abusive Supervision, Subordinate Burnout and CCB

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

It is an interesting article because the study carried out can provide new information on how external threats, as current as the covid pandemic, can influence behavior in the workplace. However, I have some suggestions and doubts that the authors must justify.

Abstract

-   Lines 13-15. “supervisors’ fear of external threats act as a climate cue to activate those who are inherently angry at supervisors’ abusive supervision”. This phrase can be misleading because it is difficult to understand. could you explain it a little better

     Introduction:

-      The introduction should not be to have subsections.

Method:

-        The authors must specify the research design.

-        The target population of the study should be described before explaining how it was chosen.

-          You have paid to take the questionnaires. How to avoid the "volunteer" bias? How to prevent subjects from answering multiple times? Could you explain in detail how the participant selection process has been?

-       The descriptive characteristics of the sample (line 254-260) are not included in this section, it should appear in the results section

-       Have you consulted the ethics committee? The authors must mention and say the reference.

Discussion

-       The first two paragraphs do not contribute anything new and repeat information about the results.

Limitations

-        It would be appropriate to reduce the limitations, it seems that discussion is taking place instead of limitations.

References

-   Many bibliographies are obsolete, and some citations are incomplete. The bibliographic citations used are more than 5 years old (62.7%).  The authors must update and arrange the bibliography.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

References - some articles are too old e.g.  3, 4, 6, 9, 15, 29, 43. Please use more recent literature.

Methods - no description of the statistical methods used. Although a partial description is in the Results section (4.1. Analytical Strategy), a detailed description should be in the Method section.

Conclusions - some conclusions are poorly understood. Please improve

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review your manuscript “How Fear of External Threats Plays Roles: An Examination of Supervisors’ Trait Anger, Abusive Supervision and Subordinate Burnout and CCB”. This paper tests an interesting premise that external threats cause increased trait anger in supervisors, which subsequently yielded greater abusive supervision and increased burnout and CCB in subordinates. In this way, the study explains the mechanisms via which external threats cause harm to employees.

The study is well executed and discusses a timely issue. However, there are some sections of the paper that could be refined to fully enhance the contributions of this manuscript. I list my suggestions below:

1. Can the authors clarify how fear of organisational layoffs is classed as an external threat? By the authors own definition, external threats are undesirable events or harm from outside of the organization.  I understand COVID-19 as an external threat but layoffs happen from within the organisation. Perhaps I am not understanding the broader definition, but I think others will feel confusion too, so more unpacking is needed here.

2. How do the authors propose to counterbalance cultural influences on this question? Responses to abusive supervision (and other forms of negative workplace behaviour) vary considerably across individualist and collectivist countries

Salin, D., Cowan, R., Adewumi, O., Apospori, E., Bochantin, J., D’Cruz, P., ... & Zedlacher, E. (2018). Workplace bullying across the globe: A cross-cultural comparison. Personnel Review

Is it possible that this effect may not hold true in less collectivist nations? I did not see any discussion of the this at the end of the paper – I think it is worth including a paragraph.

3. I hold concerns about the practical implications iterated by the authors. First, there are a number of perceived and real barriers to reporting bad behaviour, especially when the perpetrator is a direct line supervisor:

Tye-Williams, S., & Krone, K. J. (2017). Identifying and re-imagining the paradox of workplace bullying advice. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 45(2), 218-235.

Carter, M., Thompson, N., Crampton, P., Morrow, G., Burford, B., Gray, C., & Illing, J. (2013). Workplace bullying in the UK NHS: a questionnaire and interview study on prevalence, impact and barriers to reporting. BMJ open, 3(6), e002628.

Additionally, the authors suggestion that “organizations should lower the detrimental effects of external threats by safeguarding employees’ benefits even in adversity to improve the work climate” is optimistic to a fault – external threats will always exist, and organisational layoffs can not always be avoided.

I would like to see the authors think more deeply about the practical implications of the findings and discuss more realistically how they may be applied.

4. Please update the model to demonstrate the three-time point data structure – some clarification around why 3 time points were selected would be good too.

 5. There are spelling and grammatical omissions throughout the paper (e.g., line 419, missing words; line 446 – findings are supported not proved). Please conduct a thorough proofread.

I hope these comments help improve this piece of work, and I wish the authors good fortune in their future research endeavours.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

Thank you very much for attending to the suggestions and comments, the quality of the article has improved. Congratulations for the work you have done.

All the best

Author Response

Please see the attachment. We have added information on the approval of the  ethics committee, on the informed consent and indicate the contribution of each author to the manuscript. Please kindy check it. Thank you for the remindings and effort. 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx