Effects of Difficult Coworkers on Employees’ Responses in Macao’s Public Organizations—The Mediating Role of Perceived Stress

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In this research, the authors investigated the effects of difficult coworkers on employees’ responses including intention to leave, job stress and mental health in Macao’s public organization.

The research purpose of this study is very interesting since it will be contributing to the knowledge of organizational issues i.e., understanding of difficult coworkers as a critical organizational issue in the public sector and how the job environment is affected negatively. However, there are some critical points. First, the paper should be formatted to the standard of the journal. Second, correction of some grammar. Third, some points to look out for in the methodology. Lastly, disagreement to definition of some terms. For these reasons, this paper needs to be revised before publishing to the MDPI Journals.

1. First, the in-text citation format of the manuscript according to the Instruction for Authors of MDPI Journal is different.
2. In Chapter 1, line 30: Maintain one format for numbers
3. In Chapter 1, line 80: Please check the grammar “understanding on difficult…….”
4. In Chapter 2, line 121: Please delete ‘no matter’
5. In Chapter 2, line 183: Please delete of the ‘the link’
6. In Chapter 2, Figure 1: The caption of the figure should be centered
7. In Chapter 3, line 232: The reviewer does not agree with the definition of ‘Bossy’. It can be explained as an employee who is fond of giving people orders.
8. In Chapter 4, Table 2: Although the Cronbach’s alpha values have been mentioned in Chapter 3, line 255, it can be added to Table 2.
9. In the discussion section, from line 399 the results can further be interpreted from the perspective of previous studies and discussed in the broadest context.
10. Cronbach’s alpha value was determined to measure reliability or internal consistency. Cronbach’s alpha value greater than or equal to 0.70 is considered acceptable. The author should state the reason behind the use of the Cronbach’s alpha.
11. For data analysis, inferential statistics should be used instead descriptive statistics since the author is looking at hypothesis tests.
12. For the hypothesis testing, the partial least squares-structural equation modeling was used. The author stated some advantages of PLS-SEM approach over the covariance-based structural equation modeling.
13. According to Cohen, the effect sizes have their values to be 0.20, 0.50 and 0.80; 0.02, 0.15 and 0.35 for a t-test and multiple regression respectively. The author should specify the function of the analysis i.e., multiple regression to make it clear to any reader.
14. The author should develop a framework to capture all the processes used in the research.
15. The Sobel’s test used in evaluating the mediating role of perceived stress on the relationships between attitude towards difficult coworkers and mental health and between attitude towards difficult coworkers and intention to leave should be explained in the methodology.

Author Response

Reviewer #1

General comment: In this research, the authors investigated the effects of difficult coworkers on employees’ responses including intention to leave, job stress and mental health in Macao’s public organization. The research purpose of this study is very interesting since it will be contributing to the knowledge of organizational issues i.e., understanding of difficult coworkers as a critical organizational issue in the public sector and how the job environment is affected negatively. However, there are some critical points. First, the paper should be formatted to the standard of the journal. Second, correction of some grammar. Third, some points to look out for in the methodology. Lastly, disagreement to definition of some terms. For these reasons, this paper needs to be revised before publishing to the MDPI Journals.

Our response: Thanks very much for reading our manuscript and providing us useful comments for improvement. We studied your comments and suggestions carefully and revised the manuscript accordingly. The changes we made are highlighted in Yellow. We sincerely hope that you will find the revised manuscript publishable.

 

1^st Comment: First, the in-text citation format of the manuscript according to the Instruction for Authors of MDPI Journal is different.

Our response: Thank you for pointing out this error. After studying author guidelines carefully, we realized that references in Administrative Sciences should be cited in the “Author-Date” format, for example (Cheng 2015) and (Baig et al. 2021) and no punctuation between author and date should be used. As suggested by you, we updated the manuscript accordingly.

 

2^nd Comment: In Chapter 1, line 30: Maintain one format for numbers.

Our responses: Thanks for your comment. We rewrote the sentence as “…the number of public sector employees increased to over 32,000 in 2020 from around 17,000 in 2002.”

 

3^rd Comment: In Chapter 1, line 80: Please check the grammar “understanding on difficult…….”

Our response: Thanks for your comment. We rewrote the sentence as “…the identification of difficult coworkers as…”

 

4^th Comment: In Chapter 2, line 121: Please delete ‘no matter’

Our response: Thanks for your comment. As suggested by you, we deleted “no matter” from the text.

 

5^th Comment: In Chapter 2, line 183: Please delete of the ‘the link’

Our response: Thanks for pointing out this typing mistake. As suggested by you, we deleted the second “the link” from the text.

 

6^th Comment: In Chapter 2, Figure 1: The caption of the figure should be centered.

Our response: Thanks for your comment. As suggested by you, the caption of this figure was centered.

 

7^th Comment: In Chapter 3, line 232: The reviewer does not agree with the definition of ‘Bossy’. It can be explained as an employee who is fond of giving people orders.

Our response: Thanks so much for your comment. As suggested by you, we changed the definition of Bossy as “…an employee who is fond of giving people orders.”

 

8^th Comment: In Chapter 4, Table 2: Although the Cronbach’s alpha values have been mentioned in Chapter 3, line 255, it can be added to Table 2.

Our response: Thanks for your suggestion. We included the Cronbach’s alpha values in Table 2.

 

9.In the discussion section, from line 399 the results can further be interpreted from the perspective of previous studies and discussed in the broadest context.

Our response: Thanks for your comment. In the revised manuscript, we rewrote this paragraph as:

“      Difficult coworkers significantly influenced employees’ attitude towards them. This finding was consistent with the findings of Duck, Foley, and Kirkpatrick (2006), Tuikka (2020), and Yu and To (2021). The mean scores of encountering attitude towards difficult coworkers’ items were found to be between 4.62 and 5.05, much higher than the mean scores of general subjective attitude towards difficult coworkers’ items ranging from 3.89 to 4.36. The two items that had the highest mean scores were “How difficult is to communicate with this person?” and “How time-consuming is dealing with this person?” The path coefficient of the link between the second-order difficult coworkers’ construct and the second-order attitude towards difficult coworkers’ construct was moderate at 0.523 while attitude towards difficult workers had a weak direct effect on perceived stress (beta=0.203), a very weak direct effect on intention to leave (beta=0.107), and a non-significant direct effect on mental health. It is not unexpected because dealing with difficult people will make one feel frustrated that eventually causes stress (Krebs, Garrett, and Konrad 2006) and a higher turnover intention (Mosadeghrad, Ferlie, and Rosenberg 2011), but may not adversely affect his/her mental health. Nevertheless, perceived stress had a medium effect size (f2) of 0.276 on intention to leave. The finding was consistent with the one reported by Giauque, Anderfuhren-Biget, and Varone (2019) who explored the impact of perceived stress on turnover intention in international organizations. Taken together, the study indicated that the total effect of attitude towards difficult coworkers on intention to leave was weak and significant (total effect = 0.202, p<0.001) while the total effect of attitude towards difficult coworkers on mental health was very weak, negative, and insignificant (total effect = -0.109, p>0.05). The insignificant effect of attitude towards dif-ficult coworkers on mental health was probably due to Chinese people tend to adopt positive coping styles i.e. asking relatives and friends for advice when they work under pressure (Yan et al. 2021) that can help maintaining mental health”

Because of these changes, the following four references were added:

• Krebs, E.E., J.M. Garrett, and T.R. Konrad. 2006. The difficult doctor? Characteristics of physicians who report frustration with patients: An analysis of survey data. BMC Health Services Research 6(1): 1-8.
• Giauque, D., S. Anderfuhren-Biget, and F. Varone. 2019. Stress and turnover intents in international organizations: Social support and work–life balance as resources. International Journal of Human Resource Management 30(5): 879-901.
• Mosadeghrad, A.M., E. Ferlie, and D. Rosenberg. 2011. A study of relationship between job stress, quality of working life and turnover intention among hospital employees. Health Services Management Research 24(4): 170-181.
• Tuikka, S. 2020. Negative relationships in the workplace. In Mikkola, L., and M. Valo (Eds.). Workplace communication. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 136-148.

 

10^th Comment: Cronbach’s alpha value was determined to measure reliability or internal consistency. Cronbach’s alpha value greater than or equal to 0.70 is considered acceptable. The author should state the reason behind the use of the Cronbach’s alpha.

Our response: Thanks for your comment. In the revised manuscript, we rewrote the last few sentences to explain the reason for using Cronbach’s alpha as:

“…Scale reliability and internal consistency were checked using Cronbach’s alpha. The Cronbach’s alpha values of busy body, lording power, unprofessional behavior, sexual harassment, bossy, and incompetence ranged from 0.728 to 0.875. The Cronbach’s alpha values of general subjective attitude towards difficult coworkers, encountering attitude towards difficult coworkers, perceived stress, mental health, and intention to leave were between 0.717 and 0.916. All these values were higher than the threshold of 0.70 as recommend by Hair et al. (2009).”

 

11^th Comment: For data analysis, inferential statistics should be used instead descriptive statistics since the author is looking at hypothesis tests.

Our response: Thanks so much for your comment. We rewrote the first two paragraphs of 3.3 Data Analysis in which the term “descriptive statistics” was deleted as:

“      Data were entered into an IBM SPSS data file. Demographic variables such as gender, age group, education, marital status, job position, and work experience were used to profile respondents. Means, standard deviations, skewness, and kurtosis were calculated for all Likert scale items. Specifically, skewness and kurtosis were used to assess the normality of data on items of employees’ perceptions of difficult coworkers, perceived stress, mental health, and intention to leave. Additionally, a series of t-tests and ANOVAs were performed to investigate the effects of gender, age group, and education on employees’ perceptions.

Hypotheses H1 to H6 were tested using the partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach. This approach has been widely adopted in marketing, business, and organizational management in recent years (Hair et al. 2017, 2019). It is a variance-based…”

 

12^th Comment: For the hypothesis testing, the partial least squares-structural equation modeling was used. The author stated some advantages of PLS-SEM approach over the covariance-based structural equation modeling.

Our response: Thanks for your comment. Yes, we highlighted some advantage of PLS-SEM approach over the covariance-based SEM as indicated by Hair et al. (2019) as:

“…It is a variance-based structural equation modeling approach and has a number of advantages over covariance-based structural equation modeling approach such as fewer restrictions on sample size and the distributions of responses, its ability to handle complex models with many constructs, and its versatile explanatory and predictive capabilities (Hair et al. 2019). It can explore causal relationships among a set of latent constructs and the relationships between latent constructs and their observed indicators simultaneously. SmartPLS 2.0 was used in the study (Ringle, Wende, and Will 2005)…”

 

13^th Comment: According to Cohen, the effect sizes have their values to be 0.20, 0.50 and 0.80; 0.02, 0.15 and 0.35 for a t-test and multiple regression respectively. The author should specify the function of the analysis i.e., multiple regression to make it clear to any reader.

Our response: Thanks very much for your comment. As suggested by you, we rewrote the sentence in the 2^nd paragraph of 3.3. Data Analysis as:

“…The effect sizes were considered as large, medium and small when their values were 0.35, 0.15, and 0.02 for multiple regression analyses, respectively (Cohen 1988)….”

 

14^th Comment: The author should develop a framework to capture all the processes used in the research.

Our response: Thanks for your suggestion. We created a new figure (Figure 1) that captures all the processed used in the research. Figure 1 is shown at the end of Section 1 Introduction.

 

15^th Comment: The Sobel’s test used in evaluating the mediating role of perceived stress on the relationships between attitude towards difficult coworkers and mental health and between attitude towards difficult coworkers and intention to leave should be explained in the methodology.

Our response: Thank for your comment. As suggested by you, we added the following sentence in the methodology - Section 3.2 as:

“…As suggested by Baron and Kenny (1986), Sobel’s test was used to identify whether the mediator (perceived stress) fully or partially mediates the independent variable (attitude towards difficult coworkers) and the dependent variables (mental health and intention to leave).”

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors investigated through structural equation modeling approach the effects of difficult coworkers on employees’ responses (i.e., stress levels, mental health consequences, intention to leave). The paper is really robust and well written, nonetheless, I would suggest some slight modifications. 

 

• Please specify if statistical assumptions have been checked. For instance, has normality been checked for Pearson's correlations? SEM assumptions should be checked too, and a clear statement must be provided (Multicollinearity, outliers analysis, Multivariate Normality). 
• When talking about incivility in the workplace you can also refer to this positional paper: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01805. 

Author Response

Reviewer #2

General comment: The authors investigated through structural equation modeling approach the effects of difficult coworkers on employees’ responses (i.e., stress levels, mental health consequences, intention to leave). The paper is really robust and well written, nonetheless, I would suggest some slight modifications.

Our response: Thank you very much for reading our manuscript and providing us valuable comments for improvement. We studied your comments carefully and revised the manuscript accordingly. The changes we made are highlighted in Yellow. We sincerely hope that you are satisfied with the changes we made.

 

1^st Comment: Please specify if statistical assumptions have been checked. For instance, has normality been checked for Pearson’s correlations? SEM assumptions should be checked too, and a clear statement must be provided (Multicollinearity, outliers analysis, Multivariate Normality).

Our response: Thanks for your comment. We checked the normality of data before conducting correlation analysis and PLS-SEM. In the revised manuscript, we added two columns: one for skewness and another one for kurtosis in Table 2. Additionally, we added the following sentence in the first paragraph of Section 4 Results as:

“…Table 2 shows that the values of skewness and kurtosis ranged from -0.632 to 0.536 and -0.896 to 0.082, respectively. As these values were between -1 and +1, the data were normally distributed (Mishra et al. 2019). Q-Q plots of all Likert scale items were produced. They confirmed the normality of data and no outlier was observed in the collected data.”

In the end of Section 4.2, we also reported that:

“…To check for multicollinearity, latent variable scores of the inner model were extracted from SmartPLS and entered into an IBM SPSS file. A multiple regression analysis was run using difficult coworkers, attitude towards difficult coworkers, and perceived stress as independent variables and intention to leave (or mental health) as dependent variable. The variance inflation factors (VIF) of three independent variables were 1.381, 1.436, and 1.046, respectively while tolerance values were 0.724, 0.697, and 0.956, respectively. As all VIF values were below 10 and tolerance values were higher than 0.1 (Hair et al. 2009), multicollinearity was not an issue in the study.”

 

2^nd Comment: When talking about incivility in the workplace you can also refer to this positional paper: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01805.

Our response: Thanks for your comment. We studied this article thoroughly and found that it was well written and relevant to our work. Additionally, we found another article (Di Fabrio and Gori 2016) that covered workplace relational civility. Thus, we rewrote the end of the 2^nd paragraph in Section 1 as:

“…Thus, understanding and managing workplace (in)civility has been identified as one of the more important ongoing human resource management topics in public and private organizations (Burnes and Pope 2007; Di Fabio and Duradoni 2019; Di Fabio and Gori 2016; Venetoklis and Kettunen 2016).”

The following two articles were added to the list of References.

• Di Fabio, A., and M. Duradoni. 2019. Fighting incivility in the workplace for women and for all workers: The challenge of primary prevention. Frontiers in Psychology 10: 1805.
• Di Fabio, A., and A. Gori, A. 2016. Assessing workplace relational civility (WRC) with a new multidimensional “mirror” measure. Frontiers in Psychology 7: 890.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The revised manuscript has enough addressed what this reviewer commented. 

Thus, this reviewer believe that it is can be published in the Administrative Sciences.