Breaking the cycle of abusive supervision: How disidentification and moral identity help the trickle-down change course.

Abstract

Studies show that abusive leader behaviors "trickle down" to lower organizational levels, but this research ignores that many abused supervisors do not perpetuate abuse by harming their own subordinates. Drawing on social-cognitive theory and related research, we suggest abused supervisors might defy rather than emulate their managers' abusive behavior. Specifically, we predicted that some abused supervisors-namely, those with strong moral identities-might in effect "change course" by engaging in less abuse or demonstrating ethical leadership with their subordinates to the extent they disidentify with their abusive managers. Across 2 experiments (n ϭ 288 and 462 working adults, respectively) and a field study (n ϭ 500 employees and their supervisors), we show that relations between manager abuse and supervisors' abusive and ethical behaviors were carried by supervisors' disidentification, and that the direct and indirect effects of manager abuse were stronger for supervisors with comparatively higher moral identity levels. We discuss our findings' implications and avenues for future research.

Beyond Mistreatment at the Relationship Level: Abusive Supervision and Illegitimate Tasks

“…On the other hand, supervisors might have the opportunity to pass down their illegitimate tasks to employees at the subordinate level. This notion is consistent with research on the trickle-down effects of abusive supervision, showing that abusive behavior trickles down across organizational levels [26,27].…”

Top-down knowledge hiding and innovative work behavior (IWB): a three-way moderated-mediation analysis of self-efficacy and local/foreign status

“…Thirdly, using social learning theory (Bandura, 1986), prior research on the consequences of positive/negative supervisory behaviors for supervisees' work behaviors suggests that supervisors are potential role models for their supervisees to provide them with a practical demonstration of desired work behaviors (Bandura, 1977(Bandura, , 1986Mawritz et al, 2012;Mayer et al, 2009;Taylor et al, 2019). According to these studies, supervisors' control over rewardand punishment-related outcomes for their supervisees motivate the supervisees to imitate their supervisors' behaviors, including a negative supervisory behavior like abusive supervision (Mawritz et al, 2012).…”

What if my coworker builds a better LMX? The roles of envy and coworker pride for the relationships of LMX social comparison with learning and undermining

“…We excluded responses from the participants who spent either too long (more than 30 min) or too short a time (less than 8 minutes) on our survey. 3 The former indicates that the participants may have experienced some disruptions when completing our study (Taylor et al, 2019), while the latter suggests the participants might pay insufficient attention when completing our experiment (Huang et al, 2012). We decided on 8 min as the lower-end cutoff, considering the fact that we asked the participants to recall and summarize the…”