【公开学术报告】Multilevel Power Plays: How Machiavellian Middle Managers Use Upward Guanxi and Downward Abusive Supervision to Gain Power

Date & Time: 9:30-11:00 am, Mon. 18^th, November 2019

Venue: Room 2101, Tongji Building A

Language: English

Speaker：Dr. Zhiyu FENG 冯志玉Nanyang Technological University (NTU)

ABSTRACT

Drawing from the Machiavellianism and social influence literatures, we theorize and test how and when Machiavellian middle managers strategically “kiss up” and “kick down” to successfully gain power from above and below. Specifically, we theorize that Machiavellian middle managers would use a soft, upward influence tactic to build close guanxi (i.e., interpersonal connection) with their senior manager to gain greater relational empowerment, while simultaneously using a hard, downward influence tactic of abusive supervision to gain coercive power over their subordinates. Moreover, we theorize that the simultaneous positive indirect effects between: (1) middle manager Machiavellianism and relational empowerment via middle manager-senior manager guanxi and (2) middle manager Machiavellianism and coercive power over subordinates via abusive supervision would be strengthened when Machiavellian middle managers perceive a threat to the existing hierarchy of power. We test these hypotheses with three-wave, three-source data collected across a variety of industries in China. Overall, the present research advances our understanding of how Machiavellian middle managers can effectively leverage different forms of influence tactics to maximize power in organizations.