Abusive leadership and employee commitment nexus: Conservation of resources theory perspective

Abstract Leadership styles have direct impact on employee commitment and may influence organizational sustainability. Previously the positive aspects of leadership are highlighted, and negative aspects still need to bring to light. This study aims to examine the relationship of abusive leadership and organizational commitment of bank employees where in employee’s emotional intelligence acts as a mediator. A sample of 255 bank employees was selected and their responses were gathered through closed-ended questionnaires. PLS—SEM was used for analysis by using SmartPLS Ver. 3.0. The results show that the abusive behaviors disrupt organizational commitment of bank employees. Despite the fact that emotional intelligence mediates the relationship but could not turn organizational commitment to positive due to strong negative intensity of abusive leadership. This study therefore recommends that employee commitment is likely to be achieved when the negative effects of abusive leadership can be weakened through using emotional intelligence by the bank employees. The paper selected a sample from banking sector from a developing country and tested a model empirically. The findings are novel to highlight the presence of abusive/toxic leadership in the banks.

Abstract: Leadership styles have direct impact on employee commitment and may influence organizational sustainability. Previously the positive aspects of leadership are highlighted, and negative aspects still need to bring to light. This study aims to examine the relationship of abusive leadership and organizational commitment of bank employees where in employee's emotional intelligence acts as a mediator. A sample of 255 bank employees was selected and their responses were gathered through closed-ended questionnaires. PLS-SEM was used for analysis by using SmartPLS Ver. 3.0. The results show that the abusive behaviors disrupt organizational commitment of bank employees. Despite the fact that emotional intelligence mediates the relationship but could not turn organizational commitment to positive due to strong negative intensity of abusive leadership. This study therefore recommends that employee commitment is likely to be achieved when the negative effects of abusive leadership can be weakened through using emotional intelligence by the bank employees. The paper selected a sample from banking sector from a developing country and tested a model empirically. The findings are novel to highlight the presence of abusive/toxic leadership in the banks.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Muhammad Imran Malik Overall supervision of the research paper, its conduct and write up and direction to the research team.
Farida Saleem Research problem identification, proposal write up and In-depth Literature review. Collection of primary data of research.
Saiqa Saddiqa Qureshi Worked on results interpretation as well as revisited the literature review in order to write the discussion and conclusion section of the paper Ramayah Thursamy Data analysis of the collected data and hypotheses testing and results write up. Have contributions in writing the discussion and conclusion section of the paper.
Usama Bin Jabbar Overall writing of the basic draft of research, checking the plagiarism and references along with citations.

PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENT
Although examining the organizational commitment is increasingly popular among employees in East Asia, few studies have investigated the effects of abusive leadership on organizational commitment in the banking sector of Pakistan. Moreover, the emotions play important role to handle abusiveness in the modern workplace. In the present study, the relationship between abusive leadership and organizational commitment is examined through the mediating role of emotional intelligence. It is found in Pakistan that there is a negative effect of abusiveness on organizational commitment on bank employees. This study calls for more attention to the involvement of policy makers to curb out ways of abusiveness to boost organizational commitment of employees for effective functioning. Additionally, the training of emotional intelligence to bank employees can decrease the negative effects and the mechanisms developed by the policy makers help reduce abusiveness in the workplace.

Introduction
Financial institutions play a vital role in the growth of economies around the globe. Pakistan's financial sector accounts for 95% of the banks that are important indicator of economic growth of the country (Ali & Raza, 2017;Aurangzeb, 2012) with its growing population of over 200 M consumers, an annual growth rate of 16.1% and an average 14% profitability witnessed in the year 2016, further anticipates potential growth in the sector, contributing to economic development, is highly dependent on engagement of workforce (Saleem et al., 2019) to their work. Further for addressing the growing consumer as well as institutional needs, higher standards of customer service are envisaged through organization commitment (OC) of the bank employees (Al-Fakeh et al., 2020), which makes the main premise for conducting this research study.
The literature advocates that the commitment, the employees' attitudes, and feelings toward their employer (Kim, 2020;Saks, 2017), have strong prediction capability for performance (Al-Hussami et al., 2018;Aslam et al., 2020;Saleem et al., 2019) and a source of realizing competitive advantage (Alserhan & Shbail, 2020). However, after flurry of reports that embark on employee engagement literature, there is a surge of other studies that continue to reveal the present realties of growing number of disengaged and barely committed employees, which has become a gnawing concern for many practitioners and higher-level authorities in the corporations worldwide (Alserhan & Shbail, 2020;Aşçı, 2020;Saks, 2017) and worthy of further research inquiry.
Among various organizational studies, the literature identifies leadership behavior as a crucial determinant of employee commitment (Al-Hussami et al., 2018) as employees look up to their leaders for guidelines and model their leaders' work ethics. Therefore, leaders are believed to positively shape subordinates' work ethics and their work outcomes (Khan et al., 2020). However, there is a growing stream of research that delineates abusive leadership to be on the constant rise, adding to employees' mental distress and workplace deviance (Lopez et al., 2020) with calls from researchers (De Clercq et al., 2020;Khan et al., 2020;Lopez et al., 2020) to investigate contextual and cultural aspects along with other variables to understand the downside of unethical leadership on employee and organizational outcomes.
The extant literature on "dark leadership" denotes it as a combination of self-centered attitudes, motivations, and behavior that result in negative organizational consequences. De Clercq et al. (2020) define abusive supervision as "subordinates' perceptions of the extent to which their supervisors engage in the sustained display of hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviors, excluding physical contact". Not only do the undesirable supervisory practices undermine morale, dignity, and self-efficacy of the subordinates but they also account for exploitative and negative organizational environment (Lopez et al., 2020;Smallfield et al., 2020). There is a dire need to address detrimental effect of abusive leadership to understand it as a phenomenon as importantly as positive leadership.
While corporations are persistently on the lookout to improve human resource practices to gain employee commitment (Alserhan & Shbail, 2020), unethical leadership approaches undermine employee positivity (De Clercq et al., 2020). Therefore, excessive negative supervisory behaviors and failure of organizations are strong pleas towards examining supervisory practices and the subsequent outcomes.
In a similar vein, to respond to the workplace stressors such as abusive supervision, employees need strong psychological states. Higher levels of tolerance and empathy are the desired employee traits that form higher emotional quotient (EQ), also referred to as emotional intelligence (EI), and without a doubt, provide a new scope to deal with organizational stressors, such as abusive supervision. Emotional intelligence (EI) is the capacity for recognizing one's personal feelings and those of others (MacCann et al., 2020) to remain committed to work. The study of emotions has garnered interest from organizational behavioral researchers to explore how emotional states help employees achieve positive organizational outcomes (Kim, 2020;Shukla & Srivastava, 2016). Therefore, the current paper aims to examine whether emotional intelligence has a surrogate effect in the above-generated argument. Goleman (1995) proposed that the EI skills can be learned where absent and improved upon where present. EI is a dynamic aspect of one's psyche and includes behavioral traits that, when worked upon, can yield significant benefits, from personal happiness and well-being to elevated success in the academic and professional context (MacCann et al., 2020;Robinson et al., 2020).
The core capabilities are developed within childhood, these are malleable and thus capable of being developed and changed; furthermore, workplace experiences have a significant impact on the shaping process. In developing this argument, Dulewicz and Higgs (2004) contend that what managers learn in an organization includes "how to feel about what they do and learn" and that the emotional dimension of the work of management is reflected through working experiences and practices.
The paper is organized as follows: in the literature review section, we first provided the synthesis of existing scholarly work on abusive leadership and work engagement and then EI as a mediator in the relationship between abusive leadership and organizational commitment; the method and measures section provides insights into the methodology, population, and instrument details, then follows the analysis and findings part of the study; and finally, the last part entails discussion, conclusion, implications, limitations, and future directions of this study.
Moreover, it is important to highlight that this study was conducted prior to the coronavirus pandemic where in no crisis situation was declared and the supervisors and employees were working under normal conditions thus assuming that they had stable emotional conditions while they worked at banks.

Abusive leadership and organizational commitment
A plethora of academic literature captures the positive leadership to be significantly affecting firms' success through people management (De Clercq et al., 2020;Kim, 2020;Lopez et al., 2020), however, more recently, a burgeoning interest from the researchers and management practitioners in exploring on the destructive side of leadership has been witnessed (Milosevic et al., 2020;Xia et al., 2019) mainly due to the fact that these ill practices (harassment, bullying and humiliation) exercised by toxic leaders not only harm employees' physical and emotional wellbeing but indirectly cause huge costs to organizations. Supervisor's mal-behavior for employees is generally depicted in verbal and non-verbal behaviors (Matos et al., 2018). It is further supported by (Pradhan & Jena, 2018), who argue that abusive treatment has incurred tremendous hidden costs to the organization in terms of counterproductive work behavior, employees leaving the organization, wasting the organizational resources in settling down the conflicts, and scaled down organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB).
It is argued that supervisor hostility is aggravated due to the fact that they are pressed hard to attain higher level of organizational productivity, consequently, this pressure passes down to the every subordinate in an attempt to "do more with less" (Tambe et al., 2019).
In line with the above argument, the changing dynamics of the contemporary corporate world, due to growing customer demands, technological advancements, and increased stress on creating high performance/high commitment work systems by the organizations serve as precursor for supervisors' hostility (Milosevic et al., 2020). The subsequent stress puts leaders into "complex or wicked" situations, which (Kim, 2020) refer to have "unknown or uncontested" solutions, providing backdrop for managerial misconduct (Wang & Chan, 2020). However, the aggressive behavior by the leaders negatively impacts employees' mental and physical well-being as well as their affective commitment with the firm. Employees blame organizations for their mental distress and consequently indulge in counterproductive work behavior such as absenteeism, sabotage, and work-life conflict (Matos et al., 2018). Further, drawing from the assumptions of Social Exchange Theory (SET) which helps in understanding workplace behaviors, it is postulated that employees reciprocate what they receive from their supervisors, thus it can be established that employees who receive hostile treatment from their bosses give back similar output, which clearly is not in organizations' favor (Milosevic et al., 2020).
Leadership styles are carrying a lot of weight to organizational success. Some leaders are targetoriented than others. Some prefer to respect their employees while others do not. Organizational commitment depends on the way leaders direct their employees. Generally, leaders having offensive behaviors do not win respect for themselves and their followers due to having hostile behavior (De Clercq et al., 2020).
Prior studies posit positive leadership styles to be associated with affective organizational commitment (Eliyana & Ma'arif, 2019) and vice versa (Aşçı, 2020). Supervisors practicing inequity dismantle the stability of the association between supervisors and subordinates. Disturbing affection, anxiety, and other uncooperative conditions trigger negative perspectives and behaviors (Khan et al., 2020), such as low job satisfaction and ultimately desire to leave the organization (De Clercq et al., 2020).
Employees' organization commitment has been defined as "the relative strength of an individual's identification with and involvement in a particular organization (Cherif, 2020). There is mounting evidence that advocates leadership styles to be positively correlated with organizational commitment (Khan et al., 2020). Lambert et al. (2016) reported being successful service organizations depends on involved, satisfied, and committed workers.
Alserhan and Shbail (2020) viewed employee's affective commitment is the bond to their institute, treated as a useful determinant of conviction and loyalty. Having an effective commitment generally develop a sense of identification to the organization's activities and retention. Given that, it is hypothesized that: H 1 : Abusive leadership has a negative effect on the organizational commitment of bank employees

Emotional Intelligence (EI) as a mediator
EI has gained robust momentum in behavioral research more recently. Robinson et al. (2020) viewed EI as an ability of the leaders and members of the organization to understand their own as well as others' emotions, to help improve interpersonal relationships. It consists of an array of noncognitive capabilities, competencies, and skills that influence one's ability to succeed in coping with environmental demands and pressures.
The Emotion Regulation Theory (ERT) suggests that people can control their emotions in two ways; first, the antecedent-focused emotional regulations, that take places when an individual is in control of changing their perceptions about certain unpleasant events, whereas during the second stage, instead of changing the situations employees maneuver their emotional expression in response to an unfavorable event (MacCann et al., 2020;Wang & Chan, 2020).
Emotional stability is required to remain productive even in the presence of abusiveness (Ezzi et al., 2016). It is assumed that individuals, high on emotional intelligence are less likely to resort to expressive subjugation than their counterparts. Employees having high levels of emotional intelligence are within the realm of possibility to balance functional and non-functional organization demands and to cut back work conflicts. Emotionally stable employees are happier and in a superior way committed to their workplaces (Soleimani & Einolahzadeh, 2017). Trust and cooperation are the outcomes of emotional intelligence that foster organizational commitment for enriched outcomes (Aşçı, 2020;Giao et al., 2020).
Emotional intelligence is about adaptive functioning involving inter-related competencies relating to foresight, conception, utilizing, and managing emotions in the self and others (Robinson et al., 2020). Other researchers viewed emotional self-efficacy as having the confidence that the activities at the workplace can be controlled by an individual working at any level. This is more effective when employees develop emotional self-efficacy and have a positive impact on the overall organizational environment (Thompson et al., 2020). Kelly and Kaminskienė (2016) argued that EI reduces the disputes and the people having emotional controls wisely resolve the conflicts via negotiation and mediation processes. The conflicts generally arise from the abusive leader's behaviors. Emotional intelligence is helpful in resolving conflicts. For the current examination, it is assumed that the employees having better emotional intelligence have the capability to manage the behavior of toxic leaders and assumingly have better organizational commitment. The hypothesis developed is:

H 2 :Employee's emotional intelligence mediates the relationship between destructive leadership and organizational commitment.
After a comprehensive literature review, we extrapolate the above "cause and effect" model. The study uses an integrated model through which we reason that abusive leadership negatively affects personality disposition (EI) of the employee, which in turn, affects employees' level of work engagement. EI is assumed to have a positive relationship with employee commitment, whereby employees with higher level of EI will be in a better to state of mind to cope with the negative effect of abusive leadership (AL). To our best of knowledge, there is no prior study that has examined the construct of this study before. So to fill this void, this study examines the impact of abusive leadership on organizational commitment of employees in the banking sector of Pakistan through mediating influence of Emotional intelligence. The current study makes contributions to the existing literature of leadership, positive psychology, and organizational behavior. Cahyono et al. (2020) emphasized uncovering the consequences of unethical leadership because it leads to negative work outcomes that have not been clearly examined before in Pakistani banking industry. Secondly, it addresses Bhalerao and Kumar (2016) call to empirically test the premise whether EI and employee commitment always significantly relate with each other, See

Design and sampling
Positivism (Cohen, 2007), deductive approach along with primary cross-sectional data was used by sampling 255 bank employees through a questionnaire. The federal area was selected reason being the organizations as a whole and banks, in particular, operating in this geographic location experience cut-throat competition and there are chances that the managers may adopt undesirable behaviors for achieving and maintaining a competitive edge.
A total of 255 bank employees (middle-level managers) were sampled, who responded on voluntary basis, in which 147 (57.6%) were male bank employees and the remaining were female. All the employees were working full time that is they used to work from 9 AM to 5 PM. The full-time employees were considered for the study for they are well versed with the managerial practices at the workplace and were supposed to have better commitment levels. The middle-level managers were considered for the reason they interact frequently with supervisors and sub-ordinates thus supposed to be emotionally intelligent. It was ensured that they had experienced the bad behavior of their boss at-least once while at the job. The minimum education of the respondents was graduation for they can better read and understand the statements provided in English in the questionnaire and respond to them without having much difficulty. Further it was ensured that the middle-level managers must have at-least one year of experience of working in the same bank. It was ensured that their responses will be kept confidential and no personal information was asked for ensuring anonymity.

Instrumentation
Questionnaires, for abusive leadership, 15 items, adapted from Schmidt (2008), employee's organizational commitment, 06 items, presented by Meyer et al. (2002), and emotional intelligence was assessed using 14 items scale adopted from the study of Palmer et al. (2009). The Likert type scale ranged from 1 = strongly disagreed to 5 = strongly agreed was used to record perceptions of the bank employees.

Results
Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis is used. The measurement model and the structural model are examined (Hair et al., 2017).

Measurement model
The model included 02-second order factors (i.e. Emotional Intelligence with 07 dimensions and Abusive Leadership with 05 dimensions). Thus, the first order factors are tested followed by the second order factor validity and reliability. Hair et al. (2017) the factor loadings, average variance extracted (AVE) and composite reliability (CR) are used to test the convergent validity followed by the discriminant validity. Table 1 for first order factors showed loadings more than 0.7, AVE > 0.5 and CR > 0.7 thus allowing us to conclude the measures are both valid and reliable. The second order factors (in italics) also passed the 03 criteria's thus both the first order and second order factors are valid and reliable.
The discriminant validity was tested using the Fornell and Larcker (1981) method. It is achieved if the square root of the AVE is greater than all the correlations in the same row and column of the particular construct as shown in Table 2. Hair et al. (2017) suggested considering the R 2 , beta and the corresponding t-values via a bootstrapping procedure with a resample of 5,000 (Mahmud et al., 2017). First, the effects of the independent variable on the dependent and the mediator on the dependent variable (see Table  3), the R 2 was 0.646, indicating that the Abusive Leadership (β = −0.454, p < 0.01, BC 0.95 LL = −0.548 and UL = −0.359) and Emotional Intelligence (β = 0.406, p < 0.01, BC 0.95 LL = 0.311 Next, the mediation effect of Emotional Intelligence on the Abusive Leadership → Organizational Commitment relationship is examined. The Abusive Leadership → EI → OC (β = −0.304, p < 0.01, BC 0.95 LL = −0.388 and UL = −0.229) was significant. Also, as suggested by Preacher and Hayes the indirect effects did not straddle a 0 in between indicating there is mediation. Thus, we can conclude that the mediation effect is statistically significant, indicating that H4 was supported.

Structural model
Finally, the blindfolding procedure is used with a distance of 07 to assess the predictive relevance of the model. The model possesses predictive relevance for specific endogenous constructs if the Q 2  value amounts to greater than 0 (Hair et al., 2017). The Q 2 for Organizational Commitment was 0.522 and the Q 2 for Emotional Intelligence was 0.548 which were greater than 0 indicating the predictive relevance was acceptable.

Discussion and conclusion
The results of the study revealed that abusive leadership negatively defines the organizational commitment of bank employees. It can be inferred from results of this study that employees possessing emotional intelligence maintained their commitment besides supervisors' hostility. The consistency of results is noted with earlier studies (Cahyono et al., 2020;Lopez et al., 2020;Smallfield et al., 2020), about employees, which reported a negative relationship between abusive supervision and organizational ties of employees due to diminished satisfaction for not having respect and acknowledgment. The persistence of abusive interaction damages employeeemployer relationships, leading to low commitment levels.
The abusive tendencies in banks compel employees to react to abuse creating conflict and loss of trust (Ahmad & Begum, 2020;Suifan et al., 2020). Resolving conflicts as a result of abusive behaviors demand proper legislation thus adding to the cost of the banks. According to SET, there is an exchange relationship between employer and employees; the subordinates reciprocate what they receive from their employer. When they will be exposed to hostility of supervisors' verbal and non-verbal abuse, they will counter it with actions that will have huge organizational costs.
The toxic/abusive leadership is found to be dishonest, disrespectful, withholding information and so forth (De Clercq et al., 2020;Khan et al., 2020;Kim, 2020) that are the intangible or non-physical behaviors. Keeping a focus on banks, Asrar-Ul-Haq and Kuchinke (2016) revealed leadership styles affecting bank employee's performance especially laissez-faire leadership style having an adverse effect on the performance outcomes effectiveness, satisfaction, and extra effort. Such leaders generally avoid taking decisions and they try to shift the responsibility of making decisions upon others shoulders. They tend to avoid providing feedback to subordinates and avoid using rewards for carving satisfaction. These characteristics resemble toxic leadership, becoming unfavorable for the employees. Abusive leadership is a barrier to the empowerment of employees and try to take credit instead of delegating the authority and sharing the information (Lopez et al., 2020). Giao et al. (2020) revealed that such discouraging environment in banks give rise to the perceptions of job insecurity, leading to being less committed.
The bank employees responded that they were not ready to spend the rest of their lives at the banks and did not considered problems of the bank as their own and avoided getting attached to the banks and were involved in destructive behaviors. Aşçı (2020) affirmed that the prevalence of abusive behaviors gives rise to counterproductive behaviors among employees. In banks, the leaders believed in self-promotion, practiced abusive supervision, adopted unpredictable behavior, predicted them as more capable than others, and used authoritative style (Zeng et al., 2018) thus decreasing EI and OC. The banks are the organizations that require collaboration and co-creation for offering and promotion of products, requiring a committed workforce. Giao et al. (2020) and Ahmad and Begum (2020) viewed abusive leadership causing emotional exhaustion hampering the abilities to concentrate. Working without a leader's support develops stress. Banks employees have to meet various demands and need frequent guidance and if not provided in time the employees may get distracted and unwillingly adopt deviant behaviors.
Due to abusive supervision, decreased emotional intelligence emerges (Davis & Nichols, 2016) hampering job satisfaction, low engagement, enhanced turnover intentions, and damaged organizational commitment. The abusive leadership converts all positive into negatives.
EI stops adopting uncivil behavior and fosters trust and enhances commitment (Giao et al., 2020;Thompson et al., 2020). Beauvais et al. (2017) argued EI allows treating others the way people want to be treated themselves. Moreover, dealing different groups with different demands at banks require to remain emotionally stable (Shafiq & Rana, 2016).

Managerial implications
Abusive behaviors at banks disrupt employee's work attitudes and decrease their organizational commitment. It generates stressful environment that calls for exercising emotional intelligence. Abusiveness at the workplace harms an individual's self-respect and decreases their morale thus counting towards decreased organizational commitment. These negative factors must be removed from banks for having unbeatable organizational commitment that is possible through having controls over the emotions. Moreover, Conservation of resources may cause information deficit that also disrupts commitment.
The managers interested to enhance the organizational commitment must develop mechanisms based on trust and justice and must reduce abusiveness in the organization. As per social exchange theory the reciprocity prevailing in the work place may enhance positive as well as negative relationships at the workplace. The negative relationships damage the whole of the work environment and ultimately harm the competitiveness of the organization whereas the positive relationships developed at the workplace boost commitment and thus can foster competitiveness and lead to sustainability.
The employees must be encouraged to use their emotional intelligence for reducing stress at the workplace and for reducing the workplace conflicts that help employees have better organizational commitment and performance. Emotional intelligence as a stress management tool to abusiveness will positively affect the organizational commitment of employees. The trainings provided for managing the negative emotions help enhance organizational commitment at the workplace. At the same time the check and balance mechanisms must be developed by the policy makers to reduce the abusiveness in the workplace.
The managers can train employees to develop emotional intelligence that will help them to manage the relationships at workplace and avoid conflicts taking place in the workplace, thus letting them to concentrate on their work affairs and thus higher organizational commitment. Similarly, it is also recommended that EI measurement should be used during hiring process. Individuals with high score on EI scale should be given preference during hiring and selection of employees. This will help in identification of people with higher EI and hiring of people with higher EI would eventually benefit the Bank in managing employee commitment.

Limitations and future research directions
A single mediator was used playing a role between the abusiveness and commitment. The inclusion of more mediators may result in bringing thoughtful insights, such as examining the effects of organization-employees relationship quality. The higher the quality of relationship may help decrease in the abusive behaviors used at organizations. Another limitation pertains to the sample size. The larger samples have the quality to explain the relationships in detail. The examination of the same linkages over time may also enhance the literature. Moreover, it is to note that the study conducted in times of coronavirus pandemic may yield different results as compared to the study that was conducted under normal conditions. In the pandemic situations, people need higher levels of emotional stability to manage the relationships at work.