Does Abusive Supervision Affect Healthcare Employees’ Turnover Intention? Investigating the Mediating Role of Emotional Exhaustion and Moderating Role of Employee Resilience and Future Work Self-Salience

Introduction: The main objective of the present study is to investigate the effect of abusive supervision on turnover intention among healthcare employees. A model has been developed and tested which explains how abusive supervision affects the employee turnover intention directly and through emotional exhaustion and how employees’ personality traits (employee resilience and future work self-salience) moderate the relationship between these variables. Methods: With a sample of 375 front-line employees who work in private hospitals of Mashhad, data were collected through questionaries with a Likert scale. The face validity and structural validity of the questions were tested, and then data were analyzed using IBM SPSS-AMOS 23.0 software. Results: The findings demonstrated that abusive supervision affected the turnover intention (P=0.17, t=3.93) and emotional exhaustion (P=0.29, t=5.28). Emotional exhaustion impacted turnover intention (P=0.67, t=12.46) and also played a mediating role in the relationship between abusive supervision and turnover intention (P=0.19, t=4.86). Moreover, employees’ resilience was found to mitigate the relationship between abusive supervision and emotional exhaustion (sig=0.022, t=-2.29), while future work self-salience increased the likelihood of turnover intention among the employees who experienced abusive supervision. (sig=0.027, t=2.22). Conclusion: The findings showed that the supervisors’ behavior had a significant impact on the employees’ feelings and actions. However, this impact was not equal for all the employees, and their personality traits played an essential role. It can be concluded that if health care organizations attempt to control abusive supervision by properly training the supervisors, they will have less emotionally exhausted employees with lower turnover intention. Moreover, hospitals should be aware that enhancing the employees’ resilience benefits the organization by decreasing emotional exhaustion, while future work self-salient employees negatively impacted the health sectors by increasing turnover intention.