Abstract
According to the concept of abusive supervision, abusive supervisors display hostility towards their employees by humiliating and ridiculing them, giving them the silent treatment, and breaking promises. In this study, we argue that abusive supervision may not be limited to mistreatment at the relationship level and that the abuse is likely to extend to employees’ work tasks. Drawing upon the notion that supervisors play a key role in assigning work tasks to employees, we propose that abusive supervisors may display disrespect and devaluation towards their employees through assigning illegitimate (i.e., unnecessary and unreasonable) tasks. Survey data were obtained from 268 healthcare and social services workers. The results showed that abusive supervision was strongly and positively related to illegitimate tasks. Moreover, we found that the relationship between abusive supervision and unreasonable tasks was stronger for nonsupervisory employees at the lowest hierarchical level than for supervisory employees at higher hierarchical levels. The findings indicate that abusive supervision may go beyond relatively overt forms of hostility at the relationship level. Task-level stressors may be an important additional source of stress for employees with abusive supervisors that should be considered to fully understand the devastating effects of abusive supervision on employee functioning and well-being.
Highlights
Healthcare and social services workers frequently become the target of verbal and nonverbal abuse in their work environment [1,2]
By considering moderating of hierarchical level, we argue that the relationship between abusive the supervision androle illegitimate tasks varies we acknowledge that the forms of supervisory abuse in themselves might vary depending on the depending on the hierarchical level and propose that the relationship between abusive supervision and employee’s position in the organization and further theorizing about what other differences in the illegitimate tasks might be stronger for nonsupervisory employees than for employees with supervisory manifestation abusive supervision across organizational levels might exist
The three-factor confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) model, in which the items of abusive supervision and unnecessary and unreasonable tasks loaded onto their respective latent factors, yielded a good fit with the data (χ2 (167) = 367.90, p < 0.001; comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.93; root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.080; squared root mean residual (SRMR) = 0.046)
Summary
Healthcare and social services workers frequently become the target of verbal and nonverbal abuse in their work environment [1,2]. Abusive supervisors humiliate and ridicule their employees, break promises, yell and scream, and purposely withhold needed information [4] This expression of hostility is a significant stressor for employees that has deleterious effects on different aspects of employee functioning and well-being, such as anxiety, depression, psychosomatic symptoms, and emotional exhaustion [5,6,7]. Abusive supervisors may display disrespect and devaluation towards their employees through the tasks they assign to them. Supervision disrespect devaluation in interpersonal interactions to less overt forms of supervisory abuse at the task level. Perceptions the extent on to employee functioning and well-being This perspective sets the stage for investigating which their supervisor engages in sustained displays of verbal and nonverbal hostility, excluding explanatory mechanisms beyond employees’
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