Cultural and psychological mechanisms explaining the relationship between supervisor incivility and hospitality employees’ work engagement

Purpose Much research has predominantly focused on customer incivility in hospitality management literature. This research proposes a conceptual framework to examine how supervisors’ power distance orientation impacts employees’ perceptions of supervisory incivility, a sense of helplessness, and their work engagement. Psychological distress was hypothesized to intensify the helplessness-engagement relationship. Design/methodology/approach Through the integration of Conservation of Resources and Social Information Processing theories, we employed a dyadic approach to collect from 200 matched responses between frontline hotel service employees and their direct supervisors from Chinese hotels. Findings We find a sequential mediation mechanism showing a positive association between supervisors’ power distance orientation and supervisor incivility rated by employees, which increases learned helplessness and subsequently decreases work engagement. Psychological distress significantly strengthens the learned helplessness-work engagement relationship, amplifying negative outcomes of supervisor incivility. Originality/value Our study contributes to an underexplored stream of culturally sensitive research by demonstrating how supervisors’ power distance orientation – deeply embedded in cultural norms – shapes employees’ perceptions of supervisor incivility and its consequences in hospitality settings. It advances cultural psychology in hospitality management by identifying individual-level power distance orientation as a driver of supervisory incivility. It also positions the interplay of learned helplessness and psychological distress as psychological conditions intensifying the adverse impact of supervisor incivility on frontline service employees’ work engagement. The findings generate novel ideas for psychologically and culturally attuned leadership training practices and mental health interventions within the high emotional labor settings.