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Drawing on justice theory, I examined the consequences of abusive supervisor behavior. As expected, subordinates who perceived their supervisors were more abusive were more likely to quit their jobs. For subordinates who remained with their jobs, abusive supervision was associated with lower job and life satisfaction, lower normative and affective commitment, and higher continuance commitment, conflict between work and family, and psychological distress. Organizational justice mediated most of these effects, and job mobility moderated some of the deleterious effects of abusive supervision.
What did I tell you the first day? Your thoughts are nothing; you are nothing. . . if you were in my toilet bowl I wouldn't bother flushing it. My bath mat means more to me than you ... you don't like it here, leave!
You see this watch? That watch costs more than your car. I made $970,000 last year, how much did you make? You see pal, that's who I am, and you're nothing. Nice guy? I don't give a ####. Good father? #### you, go home and play with your kids ... you think this is abuse, you ####? You don't like it? Leave!
These excerpts from the dialogue in two films, the first George Huang's 1994 Swimming with Sharks, and the second David Mamet's 1984 Glengarry Glen Ross, vividly illustrate what may be referred to as abusive supervision, a manifestation of dysfunctional workplace behavior that has captured the attention of academic researchers (e.g., Bies & Tripp, 1998; Keashly, Trott, & MacLean, 1994). The notion of abusive supervision evokes images of a tyrannical boss who publicly ridicules and undermines those reporting to him or her (Ashforth, 1994). However, despite anecdotal evidence suggesting abusive supervision is ubiquitous and has implications for subordinates' performance, attitudes, and psychological health (Hornstein, 1996), there has been little theory-based study of the construct. Accordingly, in this research I developed and tested a model of the consequences of abusive supervision. In the following sections, I identify the construct's behavioral domain and invoke the organizational justice literature to explain the effects of abusive supervision on a variety of outcome variables.
ABUSIVE SUPERVISION
For this study, abusive supervision refers to subordinates' perceptions of the extent to which supervisors engage in the sustained display of hostile verbal and nonverbal...