Abstract
Abusive leaders affect employees’ emotions and health and produce counterproductive behaviors that cause economic damage to organizations. The literature has focused predominantly on the antecedents of abusive supervision and its negative impact, providing knowledge on mechanisms that link abusive supervision to consequences for subordinates. There has been limited research on the supervisor perspective, on the group level, and on recovery. This review makes three contributions: first, we examine the theoretical approaches used by previous research studies to understand abusive supervision. Second, we analyze the types of mechanisms that explain how and when an abusive supervision process occurs. Third, we identify and discuss applied methodologies and limitations. Based on the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis guidelines, and transactional well-being process perspective, we analyzed 171 empirical manuscripts and 239 samples between 2010 and July 2020. We identified a growth in abusive supervision research between 2018 and 2020 and found 101 different theories. Most of these theories view abusive supervision from a social, relational, or affective perspective, but seldom from an emotional perspective. We classified four types of mechanisms: simple relations between abusive supervision and antecedent-consequences (12), moderators (47), mediators (26), and a combination of mediators and moderators (86). We found that research has mostly been performed at the employee level or on dyads; studies that analyze the team level are rarely found. We identified two methodological problems: cross-sectional designs, which do not allow the analysis of its causality, and the increased risk of common method variance that may influence the results obtained via single-source data. In conclusion, the theories used have focused on employee perceptions, which have not enabled the broadening of the abusive supervision concept to include the supervisor’s perspective and a recovery-related perspective. Research on how and when abusive supervision occurs analyzed with complex mechanisms using emotional variables and appropriate daily methodologies has been scarce. We propose a theoretical expansion including emotional theories to uncover emotional consequences of abusive supervision and the recovery concept to provide a deeper insight into abusive supervision process. We contend that longitudinal and diary designs that include teams and supervisor levels are necessary.
Highlights
Abusive supervision (AS) is an important organizational concept that is present in empirical leadership research over the last 2 decades (Schyns and Schilling, 2013)
Future research should integrate these areas into a new theoretical model to understand more aspects of the AS process. Our review examines these previously used theoretical approaches and we proposes future research approaches novel emotional theories. This allows us to see how emotional and resource theories from a positive resource perspective can help future research consider recovery methods and raise the question “How to recover from AS?” Here, we find a clear gap that should be observed because only a few studies understand AS as a process in which the employee can restore his or her internal resources and recover from a stressful situation that involves working under an abusive leader (Sonnentag and Fritz, 2007)
Until 2015, AS studies predominantly used social-relational theoretical frameworks to analyze how supervisors emulate abusive behavior from familiar role models as an antecedent of AS and how employees engage in withdrawal actions, such as reactions in response to the abuse condition (Zhang and Liao, 2015; Tepper et al, 2017)
Summary
Abusive supervision (AS) is an important organizational concept that is present in empirical leadership research over the last 2 decades (Schyns and Schilling, 2013). AS is a type of destructive leadership that is seen in the literature as a relevant, prevalent, and toxic phenomenon that negatively impacts direct subordinates, teams, and the entire organization (Rousseau and Aubè, 2018). It leads to a wide variety of negative responses, such as workplace deviance, destructive attitudes, and daily counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs) (Bormann, 2017; Eissa and Lester, 2017; Oh and Farh, 2017; Zhang and Liu, 2018). According to Tepper et al (2006), AS cost to U.S employers $23.8 billion per year, originated by absenteeism and legal expenses. AS was associated with loss of well-being for employees and increasing healthcare cost for companies and the 65-75 % of employees consider their supervisor to be the worst part of their job (Zhang and Liao, 2015; Zhang and Bednall, 2016)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
