Abusive Supervision and Employee Engagement: The Mediating Role of Organizational Identification and the Moderating Role of Mindfulness in the Sri Lankan Public Sector

Abstract

In Sri Lanka’s public sector organizations, where hierarchical authority structures are deeply embedded, supervisory mistreatment can deplete employees’ psychological resources and weaken their attachment to the organization, thereby reducing work engagement. Drawing on the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, this study examines abusive supervision as an antecedent of employee work engagement. Specifically, it investigates the mediating role of organizational identification and the moderating role of mindfulness among Sri Lankan public sector employees. Adopting a deductive, quantitative research design, cross-sectional data were collected from 209 employees using self-administered questionnaires and convenience sampling. Hierarchical regression results revealed that abusive supervision significantly negatively predicted work engagement (β = −.52, p < .001). Organizational identification significantly mediated this relationship, as the direct effect of abusive supervision on work engagement decreased from β = −.52 (p < .001) to β = −.23 (p < .001) when the mediator was included (R² = .46, F (2,206) = 87.65, p < .001), indicating partial mediation. Furthermore, mindfulness significantly moderated the abusive supervision–work engagement relationship (β = .18, p = .001), with the interaction term explaining an additional 3% of variance (ΔR² = .03; overall R² = .51, F (3,205) = 70.42, p < .001). The positive interaction suggests that employees with higher mindfulness experience a weaker negative impact of abusive supervision on engagement. These findings highlight the critical role of organizational identification as a social resource and mindfulness as a personal resource in buffering the detrimental effects of abusive supervision in hierarchical public sector contexts. Given the use of convenience sampling within a single national setting, the generalizability of the findings may be limited. Future research should adopt longitudinal and multi-source designs to further examine the resource-based mechanisms linking supervisory mistreatment and employee engagement.