Nonunion Supervisors’ Humility at Work and Union Tolerance Interact in Relation To Respect Received by Union Subordinates: A Study from the Perspective of Supervisors

Against the backdrop of negative views of unions and union employees circulated in corporate America, we proposed and tested a new prediction model of respect at work received by union subordinates from nonunion supervisors (i.e., supervisors precluded from unionization). Framed by psychological studies on perceived respect at work, subordinates’ received respect was indexed from the perspective of supervisors, in which survey response-biases were minimized by using neutral, nonwork sites for data collection. Based on validated measures of humility at work (defined in terms of low to modest self-importance at work) and union tolerance (defined in terms of low sustained hatred of unions), support was found for the hypothesized moderation, in which, as expected, a positive association between supervisors’ humility at work and subordinates’ received respect was conditional on supervisors’ union tolerance. Specifically, when union tolerance was high, the association was stronger than when union tolerance was low. In addition, as expected, the conditional association was stronger than when union tolerance was either high or low for nonunion supervisors with nonunion subordinates. Discussed are model expansion points and prospective model applications, in which future interventions are envisioned as supervisor-subordinate interventions.