Breaking Bad: Abusive Supervision of High Integrity Leaders

Hanhua Xu, Bonnie Hayden Cheng, Xu HUANG, Ye Zhou

Research output: Chapter in book/report/conference proceedingConference proceedingpeer-review

Abstract

It is well known that abusive supervision hurts employees’ self-evaluation, making them feel worthless and excluded. Conventional wisdom suggests that “bad leaders” abuse employees, however, increasingly we know that “good leaders” may at times lose control and abuse employees. Does employees’ self-evaluation suffer more or less when abusive supervision comes from the hands of a high integrity leader? Since people may rationalize away abusive behavior on the part of a perceived “good leader”, we often overlook and pay scant attention to the damage of abusive supervision that they cause on employees. To explore this issue, we draw on attribution theory to theorize, counter-intuitively, that abusive supervision from a leader high on behavioral integrity exacerbates employees’ damaged self-evaluation, as leader behavioral integrity may compel abused employees to make internal rather than external attributions of abusive acts, subsequently influencing their self-evaluation and task performance. Taking a mixed-method approach, results based on an experimental scenario study (Study 1: N = 198) and a multi-wave multi-source field study (Study 2: N = 269 employees, N = 48 supervisors) support our propositions. This work points to the exacerbating effect on employees when good leaders break bad.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAcademy of Management Proceedings 2023
EditorsSonia Taneja
PublisherAcademy of Management
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Aug 2023
Event83rd Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, AOM 2023: Putting the Worker Front and Center - Boston, United States
Duration: 4 Aug 20238 Aug 2023
https://www.xcdsystem.com/aom/program/A5p5d1k/index.cfm?pgid=891&RunRemoveSessionFilter=1 (Link to conference programme )
https://journals.aom.org/toc/amproc/2023/1 (Conference Proceedings)
https://journals.aom.org/loi/amproc/group/d2020.y2023 (Conference Proceedings)

Publication series

NameAcademy of Management Proceedings
Number1
Volume2023
ISSN (Print)0065-0668
ISSN (Electronic)2151-6561

Conference

Conference83rd Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, AOM 2023
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoston
Period4/08/238/08/23
Internet address

User-Defined Keywords

  • Organizational Behavior

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