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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.

This study reanalyzes data from Tepper's (2000) two-wave study regarding the effects of subordinates' perceptions of supervisory abuse to assess previously unexamined relationships. As predicted, we found that subordinates who more rather than less strongly perceived that they had been abused by supervisors tended to use regulative maintenance tactics with higher frequency. Further, the positive relationship between abusive supervision and subordinates' psychological distress was exacerbated by subordinates' use of regulative maintenance communications, and that relationship was reduced by subordinates' use of direct maintenance communication. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. In recent years, management researchers have investigated abusive supervision, subordinates' perceptions of supervisors' sustained displays of hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviors (Tepper, 2000: 178).1 Abusive supervision in the form of ridiculing, undermining, and yelling at subordi nates is a source of chronic stress that produces serious negative consequences (Tepper, 2007). Like victims of domestic abuse (Emery & Laumann Billings, 1998), victims of abusive supervision ex perience heightened psychological distress (Duffy, Ganster, & Pagon, 2002), indications of strain that involve dysfunctional thoughts and emotions (e.g., anxiety, depression, and emotional exhaustion). Investigations of how employees respond to abu sive supervision suggest that subordinates perceiv ing more rather than less of it engage in more retal iation and revenge behavior (