My supervisor ignores me! How supervisor ostracism erodes job crafting through organizational dehumanization and emotional exhaustion

Purpose Supervisor ostracism may do more than damage a supervisory relationship; it can alter how employees interpret their organizational worth and constrain their capacity to reshape work. Drawing on conservation of resources theory, this study examines whether organizational dehumanization and emotional exhaustion sequentially explain the relationship between supervisor ostracism and job crafting, and whether psychological resilience weakens this process. Design/methodology/approach A four-wave, time-lagged field survey with four-week intervals was conducted across 13 public universities in Punjab, Pakistan, yielding 368 fully matched faculty responses. The proposed moderated sequential mediation model was estimated using PLS-SEM in SmartPLS 4 with 10,000 bias-corrected bootstrap resamples. Findings Supervisor ostracism was positively associated with organizational dehumanization and emotional exhaustion and negatively associated with job crafting. Organizational dehumanization was positively related to emotional exhaustion, which in turn was negatively related to job crafting. The sequential indirect effect was significant. Psychological resilience weakened both the supervisor ostracism–organizational dehumanization relationship and the resulting negative serial indirect effect. Originality/value The study distinguishes the need for adaptation from the capacity for adaptation. It shows that adverse supervisory treatment may increase employees’ reasons to alter their work while simultaneously depleting the resources required to do so. In doing so, it links interpersonal exclusion, organizational meaning, resource depletion and constrained proactive agency within a single resource-loss framework.