While we would typically expect poor performers to elicit abusive responses from their supervisors, we theorize that high performers may also be victims of abusive supervision. Specifically, we draw on social dominance theory to hypothesize and demonstrate that subordinate performance can have a positive, indirect effect on abusive supervision through the mediator of perceived threat to hierarchy. And this positive indirect effect prevails when the supervisor's social dominance orientation is high. We found support for our theoretical model using data collected from supervisor-subordinate dyads.The majority of the research on abusive supervision to date has focused on its negative individual and organizational consequences, such as psychological distress, job dissatisfaction, turnover, emotional exhaustion, and counterproductive behavior, including deviance Acknowledgments: We would like to acknowledge the helpful, constructive, and developmental comments of associate editor Michelle Duffy and two anonymous Journal of Management reviewers throughout the review process.