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

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

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 involve...

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