Black Employee Mistreatment, Social Pain Minimization, and Employee Silence

Abstract

This thesis aims to investigate the relationship between mistreatment in the workplace and defensive employee silence and to explore the underlying socioemotional psychological mechanisms involved. The current study conducted two separate studies to address this empirical gap. The first study was a cross-sectional study examining Black American employees to provide initial evidence of the mediating role of social pain minimization (SPM) in the relationship between mistreatment and defensive employee silence. The results supported the hypothesis that SPM partially mediates the relationship between mistreatment and defensive employee silence. The second study employed a six-week longitudinal design to provide convergent evidence for SPM’s hypothesized mediational role in the relationship between mistreatment and defensive silence. It was hypothesized that increasing experiences of mistreatment over time would predict increasing feelings of SPM, which would partially mediate increases in defensive silence. The findings from this thesis will contribute to a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying the relationship between mistreatment and defensive employee silence, which can inform interventions aimed at reducing workplace mistreatment and promoting employee voice.