Predictors on workplace suicidal ideation: from a social interaction perspective

Workplace suicide is prevalent, yet scholars know little about how workplace factors affect employee depression and suicide in organizations. We integrate the work social interaction perspective with affective event theory to propose that both social undermining behavior (i.e., abusive supervision) and social support (i.e., leader humor) impact employee depression and suicidal ideation. We collected data from 482 employees in Study 1 and 664 employees in Study 2 through the alumni networks of colleges in Southern China. The independent variables were abusive supervision and leader humor. The experience of depression was the mediator and suicidal ideation was considered the dependent variable. Ordinary least squares regression and a bootstrapping-based mediation test using the PROCESS macro was conducted. Our results support our hypotheses that abusive supervision is positively associated with employee depression, whereas leader humor is negatively associated with employee depression. Moreover, we find that depression mediates the relationship between abusive supervision and employee suicidal ideation as well as the link between leader humor and employee suicidal ideation. Our results suggest that leader humor is a potential protective factor, whereas abusive supervision is a potential risk factor in predicting employee depression and suicidal ideation.