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Does it take two to Tangle? Subordinates’ Perceptions of and Reactions to Abusive Supervision

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Abstract

Research on abusive supervision is imbalanced in two ways. First, with most research attention focused on the destructive consequences of abusive supervision, there has been relatively little work on subordinate-related predictors of perceptions of abusive supervision. Second, with most research on abusive supervision centered on its main effects and the moderating effects of supervisor-related factors, there is little understanding of how subordinate factors can moderate the main effects of perceptions of abusive supervision on workplace outcomes. The current study aims to advance knowledge of the roles of subordinates in the formation of and reactions to perceptions of abusive supervision. Specifically, based on victim precipitation theory, the authors examined subordinates’ personality traits and self-reports of task performance as antecedents of perceptions of abusive supervision. The results show that subordinates high in neuroticism or low in conscientiousness had high levels of perceived abusive supervision partially through their self-reported deleterious job performance. In addition, the authors investigated the moderating effect of subordinates’ personality on the relationship between perceptions of abusive supervision and subordinates’ interpersonal deviance. Consistent with trait activation theory, subordinates low in both agreeableness and extraversion were more likely to engage in deviant behaviors in response to perceptions of abusive supervision than subordinates high in either or both agreeableness and extraversion.

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Notes

  1. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer’s thoughtful suggestion, we retested our hypotheses using age, gender, and organizational tenure as demographic control variables. The inclusion of these additional control variables did not substantively affect the results of hypothesis testing, but significantly reduced the sample size, so they were excluded from the final results.

  2. It is noted that the slope difference test that compares the relationship (i.e., simple slope) between perceived abusive supervision and interpersonal deviance among subordinates low in agreeableness and extraversion with the slope of subordinates high in both traits was not significant (p < .07, two-tailed test) when the control variables were included, and was significant (p < .05, two-tailed test) when the control variables were not included.

  3. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer’s thoughtful suggestion, we retested our hypotheses using the 5-item short measure of abusive supervision, which was called active-aggressive abusive supervision (Mitchell and Ambrose 2007). The results showed that neuroticism had a non-significant total effect (p = .23, two-tailed test) on perceptions of active-aggressive abusive supervision, and conscientiousness had a non-significant total effect (p = .06, two-tailed test). The indirect effects of neuroticism and conscientiousness through task performance were both significant. Moreover, there was still a significant three-way interaction (p = .038, two-tailed test) among extraversion, agreeableness, and perceptions of active-aggressive abusive supervision. When plotted, the three-way interaction showed a similar pattern of relationships among the simple slopes as shown in Fig. 2. The only change was that the simple slope difference between low agreeableness and low extraversion and high agreeableness and high extraversion was not significant (Δb 4–1 = .05, p = .645, two-tailed test). The change suggests that when perceiving active-aggressive abusive supervision, highly agreeable and extraverted employees tended to engage in more interpersonal deviant behaviors than when perceiving a broad range of abusive supervisory behavior. This may be because perceptions of active-aggressive abusive supervision forms a stronger situation than perceptions of a broad range of abusive supervision, such that highly agreeable and extraverted employees perform more interpersonal deviance under the stronger situation (Bowers 1973). In summary, our study shows that findings based on the 5-item measure of active-aggressive abusive supervision are similar to, but slightly different from, those based on the broad 15-item measure of abusive supervision.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Dina Krasikova and Liam Patrick Maher for their help.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, College of Business, Florida State University, 821 Academic Way, P.O. Box 3061110, Tallahassee, FL, 32306-1110, USA

    Gang Wang

  2. College of Business Administration, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, CBA 265, P.O. Box 880491, Lincoln, NE, 68588-0491, USA

    Peter D. Harms

  3. Department of Management, College of Business, Florida State University, 821 Academic Way, P.O. Box 3061110, Tallahassee, FL, 32306-1110, USA

    Jeremy D. Mackey

Authors
  1. Gang Wang
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  2. Peter D. Harms
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  3. Jeremy D. Mackey
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Correspondence to Gang Wang.

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Wang, G., Harms, P.D. & Mackey, J.D. Does it take two to Tangle? Subordinates’ Perceptions of and Reactions to Abusive Supervision. J Bus Ethics 131, 487–503 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2292-7

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