Impact of Leadership Incivility on Employee Leaving Intention and Job Insecurity: Mediating role of Workplace Ostracism

ABSTRACT


Introduction
Fear of rejection from a social group is rooted in individuals as described by C. Nathan De Wall, "Humans have a fundamental need to belong.Just as we have needs for food and water, we also have needs for positive and lasting relationships".The creation and conservation of certain close associations can appropriately be described as the key inspirations for human lives.Humans have a tendency to respond strongly when they feel other people ignore them, likewise the human in their social conduct start working on getting out of such ignorance (Leary, 2015).Similarly, the perception of an employee being separated or disregarded by other members of the workplace is recognized as Workplace Ostracism (WO) (Ferris et al., 2008).When employees are ostracized, they feel disregarded from societal relationships with organizational colleagues and thus undergo a lack of information about how their organization operates (Jones et al., 2009).
The studies show that ostracism evoked negative consequences, emotional exhaustion, dissatisfaction, (Liu et al., 2013), and increased deviant behavior (Zhao et al., 2013).13% of employees feel ignored or left out in the study conducted over 6 months and 66% of employees have a feeling of being left out of ignored in 5 years (Hitlan et al., 2006).In one of the studies, it is revealed that the organizations used ostracism as a source of a strategic distance from clashes, reduce pressure and maintain a distance from the manifestation of negative feelings (Hales et al., 2016).The negative results of WO as faced by a person has an effect on work and the organization as a whole (Gamian-Wilk & Madeja-Bien, 2018).Ostracized employees have reported negative attitudes towards their working environment, co-worker, and/or bosses leading to higher work pressure (Wu et al., 2012), reduced Job satisfaction (Hitlan et al., 2006) and low job commitment (Ferris et al., 2008;O'Reilly & Banki, 2016).Neglected or refused workers not only exhibit isolation (Sommer et al., 2001) but also acquire an intention to leave (Cottingham et al., 2013;Ferris et al., 2008;Yan et al., 2014) and look for a switch to another job (Ferris et al., 2008;O'Reilly & Banki, 2016;Ren et al., 2016).
An employee looking for another job is referred to as the employee's intention to leave.The studies on antecedents to reduce the employee leaving intention concludes organizational commitment and support as well as leadership support (Cho et al., 2009).The other determinants of employee leaving intentions are characteristic of employee (age, sex, and tenure), employee attitude (satisfaction & engagement), organizational and relational factors (relationship with supervisor & coworkers, organizational commitment & support, job satisfaction & learning environment) (McCarthy et al., 2020).Quitting from the job by employees at a large-scale damages an organization and hurt them economically.Staff turnover costs a company around 50% to 100 % of the employee's salary (Ketkaew et al., 2020).The employee leaving Intention (ELI) increases with the job insecurity (JI), an employee's feelings about the employment status and the income in return contribute a major part to developing the fear of job security (Hanafiah, 2014).
The general definition of JI is "the employee's concerns about the future of his employment" (Cheng & Chan, 2008).The employee's belief or perseverance (change in working condition) about the JI is coined as cognitive JI, on the other hand, the emotional response against perceived threat (fear, anxiety) of the employee is termed as effective JI (Huang et al., 2010;Reisel & Banai, 2016).There are different arguments among researchers about the conceptual definition of job insecurity, most of the studies are around cognitive JI (Huang et al., 2010).The model in the meta-analysis of cognitive and affective job insecurity proposed the employee leaving intention as a work-related outcome and similarly the peer and supervisor support as correlates of JI (L.Jiang & Lavaysse, 2018).Lack of clarity about one's responsibilities, work overload, and financial insecurity are some of the other causative factors (Ketkaew et al., 2020) There is also a link between poor working conditions and turnover among employees (Arnoux-Nicolas et al., 2016).It is also shown in the literature that interpersonal justice by leaders reduces the employee intention to leave (Son et al., 2014).The organizational and individual factors are general predecessors of job insecurity (Shin & Hur, 2020).While the interpersonal factor was also identified in the recent research as a trace of JI (Glambek et al., 2018;Shoss, 2017).
Supervisor incivility (SI) came under the ambit of interpersonal factors and is defined as a supervisor's mistreatment, and unclear intention to hurt an employee through unusual behavior (Andersson & Pearson, 1999).Supervisor Incivility is a common phenomenon in healthcare especially in nursing (Garth et al., 2018).Leadership incivility is widely reported in nursing, in a qualitative study with a sample size of 75 nurses 10% of them observed disrespect from their supervisors (Kerber et al., 2015).Leadership incivility has a negative connotation on the self-efficacy of an employee while the positive outcome of employee leaving intention, incivility is related to poor mental health & low commitment (Alola et al., 2018;Laschinger & Smith, 2013).
The negative consequence of WO is established through past research, in this study we are going to evaluate the leadership incivility and its effects on employee leaving intention and job insecurity, also moderate the relationship between workplace ostracism with job insecurity and employee leaving intentions.Supervisors' Incivility is considered a key antecedent of workplace ostracism and it is one of the burning issues and has a direct relationship with Job Insecurity, similarly, Job Insecurity generates the intention to leave the organization among employees.The review of 16 studies on the nursing cohort reveals that 67-90% of nursing staff experience incivility (Neubert et al., 2022).The studies revealed that the workplace environment has a positive impact on employee leaving intention, the bad working environment or the non-professional behavior of the supervisor aggravates the employee leaving intentions (Awan et al., 2021;Holland et al., 2019).The person-environment misfit and the supervisor person misfit are also the major contributing factors to an employee leaving intention (Ketkaew et al., 2020).A study in Pakistan revealed that the workplace environment contributes 32% to job performance and 23% to Employee Leaving Intention (Bajwa et al., 2014).

Social Exchange Theory (S.E.T)
The concept of S.E.T is proposed by Blau (1968) and he states that the high level of trust among leaders and followers depends on trust.The S.E.T refers to "exchanges of approximately the same values in which the acts of each group are dependent on the earlier actions of the others in a way that good is for good, and bad for bad" (Keohane, 1986).
Since the theory is linking the exchange of relationships, the attitude and the behavior of leadership sets the reaction of employees.The positive attitude and support of leadership bring job satisfaction while the leadership incivility develops the intention of the employee to leave the organization.Similarly, leadership incivility creates job insecurity and workplace ostracism.

Interpersonal Attachment (I.A)
Baumeister and Leary (1995), define that if the individual is socially accepted it will yield a positive impact while the rejection brings negative consequences like stress and dejection.Shoss (2017) identified that the interpersonal factor could be the source of job insecurity, the other research work also supports this concept (Glambek et al., 2018).In light of these studies, we compliment that the interpersonal relationship with the leaders could be considered an important factor of Job insecurity for the employee.

Leadership Incivility (L.I)
The summary of papers quoted that most of the employees are the victims of incivility either being ignored, excluded from important tasks, getting less professional opportunities, or judged unfairly (Kabat-Farr et al., 2020).The term leadership incivility and supervisor incivility is interchangeable in this study while conducting the literature review.The definition of incivility is mistreatment at work related to the norms of the workplace, if it is at the workplace we called it workplace incivility and if it is mistreatment by a supervisor it is considered supervisor incivility, similarly by coworkers considered coworker incivility (Andersson & Pearson, 1999).The uncivilized behavior in an organization by the leader is also labeled as leadership incivility (Sliter et al., 2012).The unnecessary or patronizing comments, interrupting others, and not speaking to someone are practical examples of incivility.The characteristics of incivility that differentiate it from other forms of mistreatment at work are insensitive conduct with others, low intent act like ignorance and disrespect, and it is not intended to harm (Pearson & Porath, 2004).Treating subordinates with disrespect and unprofessional manner could be less than bullying or discrimination also considered incivility (Young et al., 2021).Gender demography also plays a role in incivility, especially in women (Oyet et al., 2019).One of it is also concluded that the status of employee also matters, it stated that at higher status the incivility rate among males and females is not different but the phenomena are worse for females at lower status (Holmvall & Sobhani, 2019).In the civilized part of the world, incivility is experienced by the employees based on their race, the racial minorities are more prone to incivility than their white counterparts (Daniels & Thornton, 2019).

Workplace Ostracism (W.O)
In a competitive world, the ideal environment means the employees work together and to get the mutual benefit they support each other, and ultimately this relationship enhances the performance of an organization (Chang et al., 2021).The ideal environment among employees became destructive because of WO (H.Jiang et al., 2020).Ostracism has been ingrained in the Greek phrase "Ostrakon" which implies "a piece of pottery" applied as a poll vote to determine whether to expel an individual from society.Therefore, the source of "ostracism" means "to be voted out (Gkorezis & Bellou, 2016).WO is not considered an offense in most organizations as their policies address the issues of harassment and bullying.W.O is organizational mistreatment that refers to social exclusion or ignorance of workers by other employees (De Clercq et al., 2019).Studies revealed that ostracized employees are less likely to contribute productively to their jobs and instead have an increased tendency to leave their jobs.(Choi, 2020).The strong outcome of WO is deviance, job dissatisfaction, and the organization's perception (Howard et al., 2020).The WO also harms work engagement and intrinsic motivation (Haldorai et al., 2020).

Employee Leaving Intention (E.L.I)
The public sector of countries like the USA is also facing the issue of employee engagement in comparison to the private sector by 69% versus 77% (Government-Wide Findings, 2022).The engaged employee is to a lesser extent leave the organization and is more productive for the organization (McCarthy et al., 2020).The willingness and the constant thinking of employees to leave the organization is considered Turnover intention (Memon et al., 2014).Turnover Intention is the precursor of Employee Leaving Intention (Iqbal et al., 2014).The general feeling of an employee to leave the organization is considered the definition of employee leaving intention (Gnanakkan, 2010).After the extensive investigation on the topic of Employee Leaving Intention, researchers and experts determine that it is not only the cost of hiring, coaching, and development (Lin & Liu, 2017) but the imminent loss of expertise, skills, and overall abilities of competent staff.In decision making, E.L.I is considered the last stage for an employee to finalize his/her exit from an organization (Dwinijanti et al., 2020).

Job Insecurity (JI)
The definition of JI is "the employee's concerns about the future of his employment" (Cheng & Chan, 2008).In the era of uncertainty, the JI is among the top concerns of employees around the globe in past years (L.Jiang & Lavaysse, 2018).The employee's belief or perseverance (change in working condition) about the JI is coined as cognitive JI, On the other hand, the emotional response against perceived threat (fear, anxiety) of an employee is termed as effective JI (Huang et al., 2010;Reisel & Banai, 2016).To increase profitability, efficiency, and flexibility, organizations tend to hire the employee on a contractual basis which increases the feeling of J.I among employees (Reisel, 2003).Sverke et al (2002) brings his point of view that affective JI is the true reflection of JI.The model in the meta-analysis of cognitive and affective job insecurity proposed the employee leaving intention as a work-related outcome.Similarly, peer and supervisor support is correlated with JI (L.Jiang & Lavaysse, 2018).

Mediation Role of Workplace Ostracism on Employee Leaving Intention & Job Insecurity
The phenomenon of incivility on employee leaving intention was wide researched in the western countries and resulted in a positive relationship like Blies et al. (2015) conclude that employee has less intention to continue the job if he faces incivility at work, similarly to that scholars believe if the employee is ostracised and job embeddedness is missing it could initiate the leaving intention (Lyu & Zhu, 2019).The researcher also concludes the direct effect of WO on ELI (Zheng et al., 2016).Thus, we consider testing the hypothesis on the mediation of workplace ostracism.

H1: Workplace Ostracism mediates the positive relationship between Leadership
Incivility & Employee leaving intention.

Mediation role of Job Insecurity on Employee Leaving Intention
Job security is considered as the estimation of long-term attachment with the organization, on the other hand, Job insecurity increases the employee leaving intentions (Alzayed & Murshid, 2017).The employee leaving intention increases with the job insecurity (JI), employee's feelings about the employment status and the income in returns contribute a major part in developing the fear of a job (Hanafiah, 2014).Thus, we consider Job Insecurity as a mediator to the employee leaving intention.

Leadership Incivility & Workplace Ostracism
The uncivil behavior faced by the employees makes them feel that they are isolated or rejected by their supervisor (Park & Ono, 2017).The feeling of worthlessness is instigated due to workplace maltreatment (Loh et al., 2010) and repetition of such incidents at the workplace ignites the employee's feeling of ostracism in the organization (Keashly & Jagatic, 2010).The literature supports the effect of Leadership incivility on Workplace Ostracism, so we consider leadership incivility as an independent variable while workplace ostracism as a dependent variable and conclude: H4: There is a positive relationship between Leadership incivility and Workplace Ostracism.

Leadership Incivility & Employee Leaving Intention
When employees get a low level of required support from their supervisors, they develop frustration and dissatisfaction that ultimately resulted in increased employee leaving intentions (Alzayed & Murshid, 2017).The employee who faces incivility at work became disengaged and may develop leaving intentions (Rahim & Cosby, 2016).In the light of literature, we postulate the relationship between leadership incivility & Employee leaving intention H5: There is a positive relationship between Leadership incivility and Employee Leaving Intention.

Leadership Incivility & Job Insecurity
One of the factors of job insecurity could be interpersonal relationships (Glambek et al., 2018).The researcher assumes that the leadership attitude affects the perception of the employee towards their job, including job insecurity (Shin & Hur, 2020).Employees perceive the uncivil behavior of their leaders as a signal of severe risk to their job (Park & Ono, 2017).We assume leadership incivility increases the chances of Job insecurity and thus put forth the hypothesis: H6: There is a positive relationship between Leadership incivility and Job Insecurity.

Research Methodology
The targeted population was the employee of healthcare institutions working in Pakistan.The sample of 336 was collected using the purposive sampling technique and the quantitative approach was applied due to the explanatory nature of the study.A five-level Likert scale questionnaire was employed to collect the data from the employees of the healthcare institutions regardless of their role and designation.The data was gathered by using both online and in-person methods, for online data collection google form was used while the in-person data was collected by the investigator.The analysis was done by extracting the data from google forms and physical data entry in an excel sheet.We used the two-step approach as suggested by Anderson & Gerbign (1988).We first run the demographic and descriptive analysis by using Statistical Package for social science (SPSS 25.0) and in the second stage we used structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used for convergent & discriminant validities the Partial least squares (PLS) approach was adopted by using the smart PLS software for the analysis of data.

Measures
Employee leaving intention was assessed through 6 items scale adopted from Dwivedi (2015).The respondents rated the ELI ranging from (1=Never; 5=Always) e.g."I intend to ask people about new job opportunities".Job Insecurity was assessed through 6 items scale adopted from Vander Elst et al. ( 2014).The respondents rated the JI ranging from (1=Never; 5=Always) e.g."I have a feeling that I will soon lose my job".Workplace Ostracism was assessed through 10 items scale adopted from Ferris et al. (2008).The respondents rated the WO ranging from (1=Never; 5=Always) e.g."I feel others ignored you at work".The modified scale of straightforward incivility (SIS) was used to assess the leadership incivility, the SIS is comprised of three subscales.The subscale related to supervisor incivility was used in this study as previously done by alkaabi and wong (2019) for their study.
The descriptive statistics were run and it is comprised of mean values, standard deviation, reliability through Cronbach alpha, and the correlations are presented in table 02.In variables Job Insecurity (JIS) is the dependent variables, Workplace ostracism (WOS) is the mediator variable and Leadership Incivility (LIS) is the independent variable.The mean value for ELI (m 2.66, SD 0.84, α 0.815); JIS (m 2.37, SD 0.98, α 0.9); WOS (m 1.88, SD 0.90, α 0.945); LIS (m 1.80, SD 0.99, α 0.94).The correlation among all the variables is significant at 0.01 while the correlation between WOS and ELI is significant at 0.05.The model was tested according to the threshold values ≥0.5 for loadings, AVE & ≥0.7 for the CR (Hair et al., 2019).The CR & AVE results in the table show the values are above the threshold levels in loadings, AVE, and CR.

N=336
Source: Author's own elaboration According to Chin et al (2003) to test the measurement and structural model in PLS the normality of the data is not required.The common method bias was addressed by conducting a full collinearity test (Kock, 2015).The variance inflation factor was also checked by regressing all the variables compared to a common variable at a cut-off value of < 3.3.The analysis of the results shows the value of all variables is less than 3.3 (Table 2).

Source: Author's own elaboration
The discriminant validity was assessed through the Heterotriat Monotriat ratio (HTMT).
The HTMT value should be ≤ 0.85 (Franke & Sarstedt, 2019).Table 3 shows that HTMT criteria are met thus we can sum that the measurement items were reliable and valid.

Structural Model
The results of the indirect relationship are shown in table 4. Hypotheses 1, 2 & 3 are the indirect relationships in the model and these indirect relationships mediate the effect of leadership incivility.Workplace ostracism mediates the impact of LI on JI and ELI while JI mediates the impact of LI on ELI.The results of the studies revealed a significant negative mediating relationship of WO between LI and ELI with a p-value of 0.007 so we reject the hypothesis, similarly, there is an insignificant mediating relationship of WO between LI and JI because the p-value is 0.102 hence rejecting the hypothesis.The mediating role JI between LI and ELI is positively significant at a 0.000 p-value and accepts the hypothesis.

Discussion
The study tested the relationship between leadership incivility on the employee leaving intentions and Job insecurity.We also try to analyze the role of workplace ostracism as a mediator between leadership incivility and employee leaving intentions and job insecurity, it is also the part of the study to check the mediating role of job insecurity and employee leaving intentions.
The hypothesis that workplace ostracism has a positive impact on both job insecurity and employee leaving intention along with leadership incivility but the mediating role of workplace ostracism was not established in the study finding for job insecurity and employee leaving intention, since this was the new variable that we tested in our model and we fail to establish the positive relationship between the variables.
The mediating role of the job insecurity between leadership incivility and employee leaving intention and the findings of the study reveal that if an employee experience incivility, he feels insecure about his job and similarly increases his feelings to leave the organization.This phenomenon is also a new linkage in the body of knowledge and it has partially been tested until now with different variables (Akgunduz & Eryilmaz, 2018).
The result of our study suggests the direct significant positive relationship between leadership incivility and employee leaving intention, the multiple pieces of research in the body of knowledge support these results that if leadership incivility increases the employee leaving intentions also increase result (Frisbee et al., 2019;Rahim & Cosby, 2016;Tricahyadinata et al., 2020).
It is also evident from the results that leadership incivility increases job security among the employees.The results are supported by the previous studies that evaluate the same phenomena in other parts of the world and organizations (Baig & Zaid, 2020;Itzkovich, 2016;Shin et al., 2021;Shin & Hur, 2020).It is also suggested in the study that leadership incivility also has a direct positive relationship with workplace ostracism (Mao et al., 2021;Shah & Hashmi, 2019)

Limitation & Future Research
The data were collected from all groups of employees of a healthcare institution, so there might be a possibility of generalization.Hence if the data is collected from lower grade employees because they face more incivility in comparison to senior management.The other limitation of the study is its cross-sectional design, the outcome, and the exposure are examined at the same point in time.
In the future, the data can be collected from lower grade employees and can be compared the finding with the different cities of the country and with the region for generalizability.

Conclusion
The study concludes that there is a positive relationship between leadership incivility and employee leaving intention, similarly, leadership incivility also has a direct impact on job insecurity.It is also evident that the uncivilized behavior of leadership creates an environment for workplace ostracism.The finding of the research is also aligned with the previously published work.The employees who experience incivility are prone to develop leaving intentions and feel insecure about their job.
The mediating role of workplace ostracism between leadership incivility and job insecurity.The reason for this phenomenon could be the understanding of ostracism is less evolved in Pakistan's context.The ostracized employee became more cautious about his job and try to be more productive and try to prove himself more valuable to the organization and supervisor to avoid the fear of rejection.Similarly, the mediating role of workplace ostracism between leadership and employee leaving intention is unclear and not established in the research findings.The reason for the unclarity of this relationship could be similar to job insecurity since the employee is not insecure about the job while after experiencing ostracized, the motivation to leave the organization is unclear.
The mediating role of job insecurity between leadership incivility and employee leaving intention.When employees experienced incivility, they became insecure and look for other options and start searching for a new jobs.The leaving intentions are developed due to the fear of losing a job and an insecure future within the organization.