Dr. Sadia Jahanzeb

What is the relationship between abusive supervision and employee productivity? How does psychological safety figure into abusive supervision and defensive silience? Research being conducted by Dr. Sadia Jahanzeb seeks to answer these questions.

Existing research has suggested that abusive supervision can have negative consequences for employees. These consequences can include anything from increased depression, counterproductive work behaviours, anxiety, and poor affective wellbeing. Defensive silence is another response to abusive supervision, where employees make a conscious decision to withhold ideas, information or opinions. Often, defensive silence is a response based in fear.

In her current research, Dr. Jahanzeb is exploring psychological safety as a causal mechanism underpinning the relationships between exposure to abusive supervision and defensive silence. In this context, psychological safety can be understood as the extent to which an employee feels they will not be punished for admitting mistakes, voicing opinions, or taking risks that are well intentioned.

Through her research, Dr. Jahanzeb has proposed that interpersonal risk, including embarrassment, rejection, humiliation, and punishment, might result from exposure to abusive supervision and, as such, advance defensive silence. She has also proposed that proactive personality, or the tendency to take action to influence one’s environment, might mitigate the process of defensive silence. As psychological safety in the workplace can result in a number of positive work-related attitudes and behaviours, like teamwork and organizational commitment, this research is significant in that it investigates when the translation of abusive supervision into defensive silence may be less likely to occur.

Dr. Jahanzeb joined Grenfell Campus in August 2018 as Assistant Professor in the Department of Business Administration. She has co-authored nine journal publications since 2017 looking at workplace relationships and employee attitudes and behaviours, including in the Journal of Business and Psychology and the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology.