Future Past Tense and Storytelling: Can Victims of Supervisory Abuse Envision Brighter Futures?

Abstract

Abusive supervision has been a persistent issue for workers across the world. An important area of interest for organizational behavior researchers is to understand the past, present, and future of supervisory abuse. The current research examines the utility of different forms of sensemaking through storytelling that allows the victims of supervisory abuse to extract meaning from the episode of abuse. By conducting semi-structured, in-depth interviews with (N=30) victims of supervisory abuse, we identified ways by which sensemaking allows victims to derive meanings from the experiences of abuse. To our surprise, both retrospective and prospective sensemaking allow individuals to reframe the experiences of abuse. Four broader themes (namely: reasoning, attributions, psychological capital, and self-realization) were extracted from the thematic analysis of our qualitative dataset. This suggested sensemaking to be a powerful tool to shift the victims’ narrative to a more powerful one. Managerial implications and limitations are discussed.