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Previous studies have found that abusive supervision undermines employees' work motivation and attitudes, namely work engagement and job satisfaction. However, less is known about the mechanisms by which abusive supervision negatively relates to employees' work engagement and job satisfaction. Drawing on conservation of resources theory, this study examines employee silence as a mediating mechanism linking abusive supervision to employees' work engagement and job satisfaction.

Survey data were collected from a sample of 233 full-time employees of a large hotel service company in Taiwan. Structural equation modeling analyses were conducted to test the hypotheses.

The results showed that abusive supervision has a positive association with employee silence. Moreover, the results showed that employee silence mediates the negative associations of abusive supervision with employees' work engagement and job satisfaction.

The results suggest that organizational managers should provide supervisors with leadership interventions to prevent the occurrence of abusive supervision. Furthermore, organizational managers should provide employees with opportunities to voice their concerns through the use of organizational communication and participation, which can reduce employee silence and subsequently foster employee engagement and satisfaction at work.

This study advances our understanding of how abusive supervision results in poor work motivation and attitudes among employees. This contributes to the literature by identifying employee silence as a suitable mediating mechanism linking the negative associations of abusive supervision with employees' work engagement and job satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between knowledge acquisition, knowledge absorptive capacity, and innovation performance in small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

Questionnaire data were collected from research and development (R&D) managers or owners of 49 SMEs of the bicycle industry in Taiwan. The questionnaire was designed to measure variables including: knowledge absorptive capacity, knowledge acquisition of company, technical and industrial experiences of owner's and the R&D staff, innovation performance measures, and control variables.

The results show that the depth and the breadth of its owner's technical and industrial experiences best explained absorptive capacity of an SME. In turn, the absorptive capacity and the knowledge acquisition activities of an SME affect its innovation performance.

The findings show that, first, SME owners' technical and industrial experiences are contributing factors to their companies' knowledge absorptive capacity; second, instead of R&D investment, SME personnel's scientific knowledge collection and diversity of knowledge sources contribute to innovation performance of companies. Because the data were limited to bicycle industry, future studies need to validate these findings in the SMEs of other industries.

The value of the paper lies in the fact that SME owner's and its personnel's contributions to company's knowledge absorptive capacity and the concomitant effects of knowledge acquisition and knowledge absorption capacity on a firm's innovation performance are two issues seldom addressed in previous studies.