Subordinate poor performance as a stressor on leader well-being: The mediating role of abusive supervision and the moderating role of motives for abuse.

Abstract

Drawing upon Stress-as-Offense-to-Self theory, we develop a moderated mediation model whereby subordinate poor performance and leader well-being is linked by abusive supervision and this mediated relationship is further moderated by leaders' motives for abuse. Specifically, we posit that higher performance promotion motives will attenuate, whereas higher injury motives will exacerbate the relationship between abusive supervision and leader emotional exhaustion, due to their differential implications for leaders' ability to see themselves in a positive light. In a pilot study, we first examined and found support for the theorized mediation chain in a multiwave field study of organizational leaders (N = 71). In Study 1, we conducted a multiwave and multisource field study of leader-follower dyads (N = 274), which supported our predictions that the indirect effect between subordinate poor performance and leader emotional exhaustion via abusive supervision was strengthened for leaders higher on injury motives. In Study 2, we undertook a 2-week daily diary study with leaders (N = 129) to hone in on the latter half of our model, focusing on within-person dynamics linking abusive supervision and leader well-being and the moderating role of leader motives for abuse. Although the within-person relationship between abusive supervision and emotional exhaustion was positive within a given day across leaders, the lagged within-person relationship between abusive supervision and emotional exhaustion unfolded differently for leaders higher versus lower on injury motives. Namely, abusive supervision had a lingering detrimental effect on leader emotional exhaustion among leaders higher on injury motives.

Browsing away from rude emails: Effects of daily active and passive email incivility on employee cyberloafing.

“…The present study received research ethics committee (Institutional review board) approval from the first authors’ institution. Following studies with similar designs (e.g., Grandey et al, 2021; Huppertz et al, 2020; Liang & Park, 2021; Shen et al, 2021), we recruited our participants from Academic Prolific, an online crowdsourcing platform for researchers to collect high-quality research data for scientific research (Palan & Schitter, 2018). To recruit qualified participants, we set up our prescreening criteria as follows: 18 years and older, fluent in English, working full-time, working a 9–5 shift, residing in the U.S., having an approval rate of 90% or above in previous studies on Academic Prolific, not working alone, and having frequent interactions with other people at work.…”

“…The present study received research ethics committee (Institutional review board) approval from the first authors' institution. Following studies with similar designs (e.g., Grandey et al, 2021;Huppertz et al, 2020;Liang & Park, 2021;Shen et al, 2021), we recruited our participants from Academic Prolific, an online This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.…”

Abusive supervision: a systematic literature review

“…Many abusive supervision studies drew their samples from two or more nations (e.g., Vogel et al 2015 ; Yu and Duffy 2020 ). Few studies collected data from crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) (e.g., Lin et al 2016 ; Michel et al 2016 ; Kim et al 2022 ), Prolific Academic Platform (e.g., Caesens et al 2019 ; Kim et al 2020 ; Shen et al 2021 ), Studyresponse.com (e.g., Tepper et al 2009 ; Thau and Mitchell 2010 ) and so on. Importantly, we could not locate any study on abusive supervision from African and South American countries.…”

From microscopic to macroscopic perspectives and back: The study of leadership and health/well-being.

“…For example, leaders with high achievement goals might increase the risk of follower burnout (Sijbom et al, 2019) by raising high expectations, putting high demands on followers and perhaps being less aware of when followers’ resources start to deplete. Conversely, Shen et al (2021) identify follower poor performance as a source of leader emotional exhaustion. This is because poor performance triggers leaders to engage in more abusive supervision, which in line with Stress-as-an-Offensive to Self theory (Semmer et al, 2019) is particularly detrimental to leader well-being when their abusive supervision is motivated by injury motives.…”

“…The intervention studies in this issue by Hammer et al (2021), Stein et al (2021), and Vonderlin et al (2021) incorporate change by design, showing how well-being focused leadership training increases the well-being of followers and/or leaders. Shen et al (2021) examine within-person dynamics in the relationship between abusive supervision and leader well-being in a diary study.…”