Supervisors' Negative Reaction to Subordinate Boundary Spanning Behavior: A Self-Protection View

Abstract

While team member boundary spanning behavior contributes substantially to team effectiveness, supervisors may not necessarily welcome such discretionary behavior. Drawing on self-protection theory, this paper examines how and when subordinate boundary spanning behavior may engender supervisor perceived status threat and the subsequent abusive supervisory behavior. Using a scenario-based experiment (Study 1) and a multisource two-wave field study (Study 2), we found that subordinate boundary spanning behavior is positively related to supervisor perceived status threat when supervisor has low rather than high managerial self-efficacy. Furthermore, the results indicated that supervisor perceived status threat provokes subsequent abusive supervisory behavior. These findings enable us to have a more comprehensive understanding of the social consequence of team member boundary spanning behavior, especially the negative reaction from the supervisor.