A Theoretical Analysis on Leaders’ Gapjil: Its Antecedents, Processes, and Consequences

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· 저자명 : 조윤희, 윤정구

초록

Gapjil is one of the social phenomena that has been increasingly revealed in Korea nowadays. As the society is becoming more prone to revealing and publicizing unfair and untransparent incidents, people have been able to witness various Gapjil cases through news media and social networking service and could express their rage towards them. Although the prevalence of Gapjil has been raised as a serious social problem, understanding the nature of Gapjil and a fundamental movement to eradication of Gapjil have not been carried out yet for some reason (Lee, 2016). Perhaps, despite the negative effects, people naturally accept it as a cultural and social phenomenon which inevitably occurs or is deeply rooted in our hierarchical society. The cost of Gapjil is large across the country that organizational members seriously suffer from decreased mental health (Lee, 2016) which can be escalated to career dissatisfaction, burnout, and turnover intention which in turn would result in decreased organizational effectiveness and performance. As Gapjil is increasingly being discussed as a social problem, the antecedents, processes, and negative consequences are a concern to researchers and practitioners. In this study, we point out that leaders’ Gapjil results from social psychological and cultural factors including unstable self-concept, obsession with social success and Korean culture specific attitudes.
In addition, we clarify that Gapjil behavior differs from other forms of workplace aggression behavior at the conceptual level. Aggressive behavior is any behavior an individual commits with an intent to harm another person or group of individuals in the workplace. The key to aggression is an intent to inflict harm on another, Without such an intent, it is not an aggressive behavior. Compared with aggression, the goal of gapjil is not to inflict harm on others, but to maintain or enhance Gap’s leadership status in implicit or explicit status competition. We delineate Gapjil into two distinct forms of mistreatment behaviors occurring in status competition: social undermining and abusive supervision behaviors. There can be different types of Gapjil behaviors but we focus on the major aspects of improper aspects that would appear in a real work situation. Park’s (2016) research brought a similar result that Gapjil can be categorized as threatening communication by leaders, hindering followers’ social relations and reputation, attacks on members’ career and quality of life, health, gender, and etc. Taken together, Gapjil is not just an intended behavior of a leader to undermine lower-level employees but it is also about dragging down others’ social position to maintain vested interests. To be specific, social undermining is one type of workplace aggression that involves behavior intended to hinder one’s establishment and maintenance of positive interpersonal relationships, work-related successes, and favorable reputations (Duffy, Ganster, Pagon, 2002). Individuals with low power are more vulnerable to workplace abuse or harassment in which they can be harshly treated if they raise opposing ideas (Cortina, Magley, Williams, & Langhout, 2001). Conversely, leaders with high social power can possibly hinder others’ social related success when they perceive their work position is threatened by potential competitors or opponents. Also, abusive supervision can be the other factor of Gapjil that refers to the ‘sustained display of hostile verbal and non-verbal behaviors, excluding physical contact” (Tepper, 2000: p. 178). This factor conceptually differs from social undermining in that it focuses on the aspects of leaders’ inconsiderate behaviors towards their follower such as verbal or non-verbal insults. We conceptualize Gapjil that constitutes two distinct elements of leader behaviors which are social undermining that involves behaviors intended to impede followers’ social development and abusive supervision that involves intended behaviors to insult and ignore followers. Thereby, we understand Gapjil as a process of status competition and define “Gap’s overuse of a status power in a way of social mining and abusive supervision towards Eul”.
We aim to advance the research in three ways. First, the literature lacks a theoretical perspective on the antecedents of Gapjil behavior of team leaders in organizations. We are going to apply the research model to understand antecedents, processes, and consequences of Gapjil at the team level because organizations largely produce outcomes through teams nowadays. One of the aspects of team leaders’ effective leadership is relational transparency which connects leaders and followers by trust. We assume that a leader and follower relationship is going to be deteriorated once leaders start seeing followers as a mere component of a business system which will possibly appear in a form of leader Gapjil. The underlying theoretical background of our research model is that Gapjil behavior arises from unstable self-concept when leaders have low self-esteem, self-clarity, self-efficacy, and self-compassion and extreme addiction to attaining social success such as high status, power, and wealth. Also, Korean culture including high power distance, high uncertainty avoidance, and short-termism are the contextual factors that may give rise to Gapjil behaviors. Lee (2016) demonstrated that it is critical to investigate the nature of the relationship between individuals and the society for understanding Gapjil since the social background of Korea plays a critical role in the emergence of Gapjil issue. Therefore, we explain that the antecedents of Gapjil can be explained by social psychological and cultural factors which ultimately diminish self-control against harm doing.
Secondly, we explain the relationship between leader Gapjil and organizational outcomes including team organizational commitment, team organizational citizenship behavior, performance, and turnover intention. Based on social exchange theory, we posit that negative consequences that decrease overall organizational effectiveness are expected when organizational members perceive themselves as targets of Gapjil. If the members perceive that they have not gained much respect or support from the organization, they will show behaviors that would diminish organizational effectiveness such as low commitment, citizenship behavior, performance, and high intent to turnover.
Lastly, we offer a mediating mechanism that explains why members ultimately experience deleterious outcomes when Gapjil is prevalent in organizations. The relationship between Gapjil behavior and organizational outcomes will be mediated by contagion of Gapjil behavior among organizational members. Based on notions of reciprocity demonstrated in Andersson and Pearson’s (1990) study, which explains negative treatment would be reciprocal in which the distinction between instigator and target of aggressive behavior eventually blurs, we address the contagion effect of Gapjil. To be specific, Gapjil among members will be discussed as a consequence of Gapjil contagion in which unfair practices are prevalent whereby corrupt practices become internalized and embedded in organizations. Thus we propose a possible contagion of Gapjil among members, that a member who has been a victim of Gapjil is more likely to reciprocate the action to innocent targets. Thereby, we suggest a mediation effect of contagion of Gapjil among members in the relationship between leader Gapjil and organizational outcomes.
Keywords: Social Psychological Factor, Cultural Effect, Gapjil, Contagion Effect, Team Commitment, Team Organizational Citizenship Behavior, Team Performance, Turnover Intention

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