Employees' coping strategies with highly critical managers: a critical realist qualitative study in a high power-distance public sector

Purpose This study examines how employees in Iran's public sector cope with highly critical managerial behaviour (HCMB) – a culturally normalised pattern of persistent criticism and micromanagement – within a high power-distance bureaucratic setting. Design/methodology/approach Adopting a critical realist perspective, this study uses a qualitative case study design to examine how institutional conditions shape employees' coping responses to highly critical managerial behaviour. Drawing on coping theory and institutional theory, the analysis is based on semi structured interviews with 45 employees across 11 Iranian public ministries. Interview data were analysed using thematic analysis and interpreted through retroductive reasoning to identify the generative mechanisms linking organisational conditions, hierarchical relations and perceived risks to different coping responses. Findings While participants reported familiar coping responses such as emotion focused, problem focused and avoidance based strategies, the analysis explains their patterned distribution through three context–mechanism–outcome configurations, with gender operating as a cross cutting modifier. Under conditions of hierarchical control and low perceived safety, constrained voice channels behaviour toward distancing and withdrawal. Where bureaucratic traceability and evidence based standards enable defensibility, legitimacy through formalisation supports problem focused coping. Where formal escalation is perceived as risky, substitute support and relational buffering redirect coping toward peer and family based emotional stabilisation. Originality/value Rather than re-identifying coping strategies, the study explains how institutional conditions generate coping patterns in hierarchical Global South bureaucracies. The resulting “institutionally situated coping” framework links appraisal to institutional mechanisms, offering actionable levers for HRM reforms aimed at psychological safety and equity (SDGs 8 and 10).