When and How Subordinate Performance Leads to Abusive Supervision: A Social Dominance Perspective

Abstract

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.

Openness to Experience, Ethical Leadership, and Innovative Work Behavior

“…English is common language among employees working in organizations in Pakistan. Numerous other studies which were conducted in Pakistan used the same version of English language questionnaire (Abbas, Raja, Darr, & Bouckenooghe, 2014;Javed et al, 2017;Khan, Moss, Quratulain, & Hameed, 2016;Raja, Johns, & Ntalianis, 2004). All items measured in the survey were anchored to a 5-point Likert-type scale, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), except for IWB which was anchored on a 5-point scale, used different labels (e.g., from 1 = never to 5 = always).…”

Tit for Tat: Abusive Supervision and Knowledge Hiding-The Role of Psychological Contract Breach and Psychological Ownership

“…Third, because of the evidence that managers use abuse as a strategic tool [85], abolishing abusive supervision completely is often difficult. As confirmed in our study, psychological ownership provides a buffer against the outcomes of abusive supervision.…”

How career plateau beliefs and leader interpersonal unfairness harm job performance in dysfunctional organizational settings

“…On the one hand, its high collectivism implies that decisionmaking processes might be driven by a tendency to grant favours to members of an inner circle, at the expense of out-group members (Hofstede, Hofstede, & Minkov, 2010). Its high power distance also implies that it may be relatively common for organizational leaders to treat followers with little respect or dignity (Khan, Moss, Quratulain, & Hameed, 2016). The presence of organizational politics and leader interpersonal unfairness thus might be prevalent, such that employees may have grown somewhat immune to these negative aspects of their work context (Khan, Quratulain, & Crawshaw, 2017).…”