Author Identifier
Cathrine Frost: http://orcid.org/0009-0007-5227-1637
Date of Award
2025
Document Type
Thesis
Publisher
Edith Cowan University
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
School
School of Business and Law
First Supervisor
Andrei Lux
Second Supervisor
Peter Galvin
Abstract
This thesis investigates how supervision is experienced and interpreted within compliance-intensive environments, focusing on the Australian financial services sector following the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry (2017–2019). As regulatory demands and audit cultures reshape institutional norms, supervision is increasingly inacted as a symbolic performance of institutional compliance and ethical alignment. The study suggests that oversight in this context can be understood as an emotionally saturated and interpretively unstable organisational condition, shaped by ambiguity, emotional governance, and institutional tone. The research addresses the question: How do employees and managers within the Australian financial sector perceive and enact rigorous managerial oversight and abusive supervision in the context of post–Royal Commission reforms, and what implications do these lived experiences have for their professional conduct and engagement within the sector?
This study involved 44 participants, comprising 29 employees and 15 managers from across the Australian financial services sector. Participants were recruited from diverse organisational tiers and institutions. Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews, guided by the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) to elicit emotionally significant supervisory encounters. Interviews were supplemented by reflective field notes, including observations of non-verbal cues such as gesture, silence, posture, and tone. These embodied expressions informed the interpretive analysis of emotional climate and supervisory meaning making. Data were analysed thematically using a phenomenological framework, allowing for the identification of affective patterns and interpretive dissonance across participant narratives. The study was conceptually grounded in Affective Events Theory (AET), which provided a scaffold for interpreting how regulatory oversight produces sustained emotional conditions. AET helped frame both the event-based moments of affective intensity and the broader emotional atmospheres described by participants. This methodological configuration enabled the study to attend to both the explicit content of interviews and the relational dynamics in which they were embedded.
Findings reveal that supervision under compliance saturation is experienced inconsistently across cohorts. Employees often interpret oversight as emotionally ambiguous or procedurally distant, while managers describe their roles as increasingly constrained by reputational risk and institutional caution. Across both cohorts, supervision is described as affective labour, symbolic performance, and interpretive negotiation. These dynamics are compounded by identity, power asymmetry, and the emotional governance logics embedded in post-crisis reform.
The thesis makes three major contributions. First, it reconceptualises abusive supervision as a structurally induced phenomenon, shifting the focus from managerial intent to institutional design. Second, it extends AET by showing how regulatory oversight produces long-duration affective climates, thereby reframing AET as a theory of sustained emotional conditions rather than discrete events. Third, it develops a novel methodological framework for accessing emotionally regulated workplace experience, combining phenomenological analysis, critical incident elicitation, and embodied affect tracking.
This research provides a more nuanced understanding of how managerial oversight is performed, interpreted, and emotionally navigated under conditions of institutional saturation. It offers practical and theoretical insights for scholars, leaders, and policymakers seeking to understand the emotional costs of compliance regimes, and invites a reimagining of supervisory practice in high-accountability environments.
Access Note
Access to this thesis is embargoed until 18th December 2026
DOI
10.25958/252e-1674
Recommended Citation
Frost, C. (2025). Exploring employee and manager experiences of supervision in the Australian financial services industry. Edith Cowan University. https://doi.org/10.25958/252e-1674
Included in
Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons, Human Resources Management Commons