Universities across China have set up crisis management teams (CMTS) to deal with the crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study focuses on how the paternalistic leadership practices of a Chinese university CMT influence crisis strategic decisions by managing conflict. These relationships were verified using hierarchical regression analysis on 312 samples from the surveyed university during the pandemic and found the following: benevolent leadership and moral leadership have positive effects on decision quality. However, unlike most studies on paternalistic leadership, in crisis situations, the negative effects of authoritarian leadership disappear under the mediating effect of affective conflict. This means that affective conflict within CMT fully mediates the relationship between authoritarian leadership and decision quality, and partially mediates the relationship between moral leadership and decision quality, while cognitive conflict partially mediates the relationship between benevolent leadership and crisis decision quality. It indicates that a CMT must stimulate and maintain a certain level of cognitive conflict while suppressing affective conflict to achieve high-quality crisis decision-making. This state can be achieved by practicing lower levels of authoritarian leadership and maintaining high levels of moral and benevolent leadership practices.
Employees' Workplace Deviant Behavior (WDB) is an organizational threat to its sustainability. This study examines the impact of the supervisors' role in improving organizational behavior because of the gap in the body of knowledge indicating the inconsistency, paucity, and uncertainties of relationships between variables when relating to their underpinning theories. The conceptualized model consists of the impact of family supportive supervisor behavior (FSSB) on workers' workplace deviant behavior (WDB) while considering Affective Commitment and Work-Family Supportive Behavior Attribution between the key variables. In terms of methodology, this quantitative study analyzed 321 valid surveys through descriptive and inferential statistics to ascertain if FSSB negatively impacts employees' WDB. As findings and novelty of this study, FSSB is found to negatively affect employees' WDB, while affective commitment mediates between FSSB and employees' WDB. Work-family supportive behavior attribution and personal life attribution of employees moderated the negative relationship between affective commitment and WDB, while work productivity attribution of employees had no significant effect as a moderator. With three (out of four) hypotheses supported by empirical evidence, this research has broadened previous studies of workers' WDB and offers organizations theoretical and practical recommendations for managing employees' WDB. More studies could be conducted in the future to address limitations in this research, examine other related theories in a new context, location, and/or culture, or select other suitable research methods.