Effects of supervisory discrimination on employees' organizational attitudes: Moderating roles of leadership styles, leader-group prototypicality, and employees' demographic characteristics

Discriminatory acts are defined as unequal treatment towards people due to their memberships in particular groups (Goldman et al. 2006: 795). In organizations where discriminatory acts are common, negative outcomes such as corruption, decline in professionalism, increase in negative employee attitudes such as withdrawal behaviors, which contribute to decrease in organizational effectiveness are likely to be observed (Boy 2018: 51). Although there have been studies on prejudice and discrimination in social psychology literature (e.g., Stainback & Irvin 2012: 657; Schmitt et al. 2014: 921), organizational discrimination and supervisory discrimination had been underestimated by previous research in the fields of industrial and organizational psychology and organizational behavior (James et al. 1994: 1574). In the only study conducted on these topics in Turkey, Sümer et al. (2019) examined discriminatory acts in workplace in Turkey and found that discrimination in workplace included sub-dimensions of family and marital status based, sexual orientation based, age based, status based, belief/worldview/ideology based, disability based, group membership based and physical appearance based discrimination. In the present study, firstly, a scale of supervisory discrimination was be established by revising and rewording the organizational discrimination scale developed by Sümer et al. (2019). Secondly, based on the propositions of social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner 1979: 33), the relationships of supervisory discrimination with different types of organizational commitment (i.e., affective, normative, and continuance commitment) levels, three dimensions of organizational justice (i.e., procedural, interpersonal and informational justice) of employees were examined within the framework of the proposed regression model. In addition, moderating effects of two different leadership styles (i.e., paternalistic leadership and task-oriented leadership) and leader-group prototypicality (Hogg 1996: 295) in the above mentioned relationships were investigated. It was expected that employees whose managers predominantly adopted the paternalistic leadership style would report higher organizational commitment and organizational justice than subordinates of managers with low scores on paternalistic leadership style. On the other hand, in case of supervisory discrimination, employees whose managers score high on task-oriented leadership style were expected to report lower levels of organizational commitment and organizational justice than employees whose managers with score low on task-oriented leadership style. In addition, when the manager's perceived leader-group prototypicality is high, the negative relationships between supervisory discrimination and employees' perceptions of organizational commitment and justice are expected to be weaker than when the manager's leader-group prototypicality is low. Finally, moderating effects of employees' age and gender on the relationships between supervisory discrimination and the outcome variables were examined. Data were collected from 720 employees in Turkey and analysis of data was conducted by using IBM SPSS program. Supervisory discrimination was negatively associated with employees' organizational commitment, organizational justice, job satisfaction and psychological well-being. In addition, most of moderation hypotheses were supported. The findings are discussed in terms of theoretical and practical implications as well as suggestions for future research.