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The present study contributes to the growing body of research on abusive supervision in school settings, particularly by principals. School leadership (principal) behavior has been a topical issue for decades in educational research. This paper attempts to add to scholarly knowledge in the area of school leadership and specifically the effect of abusive school leadership on organizational productivity and organization citizen behavior. Put succinctly, the purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of abusive school leadership on school performance and teacher behavior. Abusive leadership is attributable to behavior that is deviant, antisocial and counter-productive and that which is uncivil.

In examining abusive school leadership behavior and its effect on school performance and teacher behavior, this conceptual paper draws heavily from an in-depth analysis of extant scholarship and uses Rawls theory of social justice as a conceptual tool. Social justice theorists believe that social institutions are embedded with immense responsibility of dispensing justice, fairness and equity.

Building from these relevant literatures and grounding the argument from the Rawlsian perspective of social justice, it can be argued that abusive school leadership perpetuates unfair and unjust practices toward teachers, which negatively affects performance. Literature reviewed convincingly indicates that abusive tendencies are practiced in school by school leadership. Further, these abusive practices negatively impact on the following: teacher productivity, teacher turnover and, finally, staff members’ well-being and health. The findings confirm that these practices perpetuate social injustice. Schools are social institutions and have to ensure that justice is served on all members of the organization, and, for this reason, Rawls (1971) argues that justice is the first virtue of social institutions.

The findings of this study have a number of important implications for future practice. It is critical in this study to suggest that in trying to deal with scourge, tougher measures need to be taken by various education departments to ensure that the problem is dealt with effectively. One of the interventions that is suggested is tougher policy positions on matters related to abusive leadership. In education departments that have legislation regarding consequences regarding abusive school leadership practices, tougher action should be taken against leadership which practice abuse.

School leadership is a highly contested research space and this conceptual paper is of great value because it adds to the already existing insights and understanding in abusive leadership in educational settings. This paper is of great significance because it focuses on the effect of abusive school leadership on teachers’ behavior and school performance.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model of abusive leadership as experienced by young workers. Abusive leadership is understood to be subjective and as such this research seeks to explore the experience of abusive leadership through a qualitative approach.

Drawing on interviews with 30 young workers who identified themselves as having a “bad” boss, this study employs a constructivist grounded theory approach in order to identify behaviours, moderators and outcomes of abusive leadership.

A definition and model of abusive leadership as experienced by young workers is proposed. The model details 11 behaviours, five moderators and six individual and two organizational outcomes of abusive leadership.

The adoption of a constructivist grounded theory approach reveals several unique factors that moderate the relationship between behaviors and outcomes of abusive leadership in young workers. By grounding the model in the actual experiences of young workers, the paper offers possibilities for future research on abusive leadership and young workers and across demographic groups.

More than a decade of research on abusive leader behaviors suggests a consensus regarding its deleterious effects on employees’ contextual performance. Therefore, research on how to cope with abusive leader behaviors is both theoretically and practically important. The purpose of this paper is to examine how individuals’ personality and appropriate coping strategy may jointly help in weakening the negative effects of abusive leader behaviors.

The study examines the relationship between social support coping strategy and agreeableness. Data collected from full-time employees and their reporting managers were used for analyses. Data were analyzed using moderated regression techniques followed by conditional indirect effects testing.

The study provides supports to the evidence that the relationship between abusive leader behaviors and contextual performance was weaker for employees high in agreeableness. Additionally, the use of social support coping strategy facilitated a negative relationship between abusive leader behaviors and contextual performance. Finally, the moderating effects of agreeableness were mediated by the use of social support coping strategy.

The study contributes to theories of abusive supervision, personality and coping strategies. The results offer insights into the joint roles of personality and the social support coping strategy that may weaken the negative influence of abusive leader behaviors and contextual performance.

Human resource practitioners may benefit from formally institutionalizing social support through mentoring programs and informally through “buddy” programs for newly joined employees, to understand the organization culture and voice their concerns.

While most studies on abusive leader behavior focused on the deleterious effects, this study is one of the few that explores the role of coping strategy while dealing with abusive leader.

This study investigated the relationship between principals' abusive leadership and teachers' intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, exploring the potential moderating effects of the duration of the relationship and group size within educational settings.

Data were collected from a sample of teachers in Bahrain, using self-report measures. The data were analyzed using regression analyses.

The findings reveal a significant negative relationship between principals' abusive leadership and teachers' intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. The results also show that the duration of the relationship moderates the correlation between abusive leadership and teachers' extrinsic motivation, with teachers who have been in longer relationships with their principals showing greater resistance to the detrimental effects of abusive leadership on their extrinsic motivation. Group size was found to moderate this correlation, with larger groups exhibiting stronger buffering against the negative effect of abusive leadership.

The findings provide valuable insights into the dynamics of abusive leadership in educational settings and the potential moderating factors that can help alleviate its detrimental effects on teachers' motivations.

This chapter investigates the relationship between abusive supervision and employee well-being (i.e., job satisfaction, engagement) and ill-being (i.e., burnout, workaholism) and examines whether follower core self-evaluations (CSE) moderate this relationship.

The study uses cross-sectional survey data collected from 111 professional employees across a range of industry sectors.

Results show that abusive supervision is negatively related to employee well-being (i.e., engagement and job satisfaction) and positively related to employee ill-being, namely burnout. In addition, employees low in CSE are less engaged and less satisfied than employees high in CSE.

The study’s cross-sectional design limits the strength of its conclusions.

This chapter notes the ethical and legal obligations of organizations to provide a safe working environment and identifies the policies and procedures that will signal a commitment to employee well-being.

The study contributes to the leadership and well-being literatures by exploring the influence of abusive leaders on follower well-being and engagement. It also goes beyond merely identifying correlations between leadership style and follower well-being outcomes to investigate how leader and follower attributes can combine to influence these outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between psychological safety (PS) and employee retention (ER) when psychological empowerment (PE) is a mediator variable and abusive leadership is a moderating variable.

The study was conducted by receiving responses from managers and supervisors of the telecom industry. The sample size was 337. Standard questionnaires were used to collect data. Moderated mediation analysis was conducted to capture the differences on the effect of ER because of the presence of abusive leadership.

The findings of the study revealed that the abusive leadership moderates the relationship between employees PS and PE. The mediation effect of PE between PS and ER relationship was found to be significant. The relationship got weaker in the presence of high abusive leadership and stronger in the presence of low abusive leadership.

The paper discusses the drawbacks of abusive leadership on ER. Abusive leadership may bring immediate results. Employees may respond out of fear but would leave the organization as soon as they will get the opportunity.

The study on the abusive leadership is relatively less. The moderating role of abusive leadership on ER would add to the subject knowledge.

Prior research has suggested that abusive supervision has negative impacts on various work outcomes. However, little attention has been paid to the relationship between abusive supervision and employees’ safety behaviour. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to address these limitations by developing and testing a theoretically based conceptual model that explicitly considers the underlying mechanism and boundary condition of the relationship between abusive supervision and safety behaviour of underground coal miners in China.

At Time 1, the authors conducted a survey of 630 employees to assess their supervisors’ abusive leadership behaviours, their own power distance beliefs and their self-reflection. At Time 2, the authros sent questionnaires to the leaders and invited them to evaluate employees’ safety behaviour in the workplace. After cleaning the survey data, the authors tested our model using a multi-level analysis on a sample (n = 458) of underground miners across 96 coal mining sites in China.

The authors propose that abusive supervision decreases employees’ safety compliance/participation by reducing reflection but strengthening rumination. The authors further find that the linkage from abusive supervision to reflection/rumination to safety compliance/participation is affected by power distance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, This is one of the first empirical studies to investigate the mediating effects of a deep cognitive processing variable – namely, self-reflection – and the moderating effects of power distance on the relationship between abusive supervision and safety behaviour.

Expanding on the research of the antecedents of abusive supervision, this study aims to explore supervisor role overload as a supervisor-level predictor of abusive supervision. Based on transactional stress theory, the authors investigate role overload that is appraised as a challenge or a hindrance stressor by supervisors, leading to pleasant or unpleasant feelings, respectively. The authors propose that, based on their appraisal, these feelings of supervisors act as a mediating mechanism that can facilitate or inhibit their abusive behaviour at work. Additionally, the authors posit emotional intelligence (EI) as a key moderator in helping supervisors manage the negative feelings arising from perceiving role overload as a hindrance and preventing them from demonstrating abusive supervision.

To test the proposed moderated mediation model, the authors collected two-wave data from middle-level supervisors or managers from several organisations located in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia (N = 990).

The results largely support the hypothesised relationships and show that depending on supervisor appraisal, role overload can generate pleasant or unpleasant feelings in supervisors and, consequently, impede or facilitate abusive supervision. They also shed light on the moderating effect of EI, in that supervisors scoring high on EI are better equipped to deal with unpleasant feelings arising from role overload and effectively manage their workplace behaviour, that is, to avoid abusive behaviours.

Role overload can have different impacts on employees: on the one hand, there is a potential for growth, which entails drive and enthusiasm; on the other hand, it could feel like an unsurmountable mountain for employees, leading to different forms of anxiety. Because what we feel is what we project onto others, supervisors experiencing unpleasant feelings cannot be the best leader they can be; even worse, they can become a source of negativity by displaying destructive behaviours such as abusive supervision. The corollary of something as minor as an interaction with a leader experiencing unpleasant feelings could have a ripple effect and lead to adverse outcomes for organisations and their employees. This study explores the different perceptions of role overload and the subsequent feelings coming from those perceptions as supervisor-level predictors of abusive supervision. While it is not possible to objectively put a different lens inside the minds of supervisors when they face stressors at work, to feel pleasant or unpleasant, they can be trained to manage their negative feelings and keep their behaviours in check. Particularly, training managers to be more emotionally intelligent can help them not only achieve growth by overcoming challenges at work but also acknowledge and adapt their feelings to keep their behaviours in the workplace positive. In practical terms, this research can provide organisations with the knowledge required to nip the problem of abusive supervision in the bud, as prevention is always better than cure.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to unlock how and why abusive supervision influences employees’ day-to-day behaviors. Thus, the present study proposes that employees who are continuously faced with a supervisor’s hostile verbal and nonverbal behavior might obstruct their willingness to exhibit two different kinds of extra-role behaviors [i.e. organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and voice] because sustained abusive behavior might hinder employees from their tasks and result in disengagement. Abused employees are more likely to disengage from their current tasks, and this is likely to in turn result in lower OCB and voice.

The data were collected from a Taiwan mid-sized high-tech manufacturing company. The present study adopted a within-person approach (a daily-basis research design) and collected data from 60 front-line employees over 10 working days. Although all variables were self-rated, common method variance is minor. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted to ensure discriminant and convergent validity, and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to test the hypotheses.

The results of CFA ensure the measures have discriminant and convergent validity, while the results of HLM analysis showed that work engagement fully mediates the negative relationship between abusive supervision and the two kinds of extra-role behaviors. The bootstrapping results also support the full mediation effect of work engagement.

The present study used the job demands-resources model to examine how abusive supervision influences employees’ OCB and voice and found that work engagement is one possible mechanism between these two types of extra-role behavior. Specifically, a daily research design discovered that in a given working day, once a leader exhibits abusive supervision behavior, compared with any given day without abusive behaviors, employees will find it difficult to focus on their current tasks (i.e. through exhibiting decreased work engagement), which will in turn influence their willingness to exhibit OCB and voice on that particular day. Thus, both researchers and managers should focus on the daily interactions between leaders and employees because it is impossible to achieve organization success in one day, but rather such success is the aggregate result of both leaders’ and employees’ daily efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a moderated mediation model wherein abusive supervision predicts subordinate’s stress and turnover intentions through Psychological Capital (PsyCap). Leader–member exchange (LMX) moderates the abusive supervision-outcome relationship through PsyCap.

Two wave data were collected from 1,193 full-time employees across organizations in India.

Results suggest that abusive supervision is significantly related to intention to quit and perceive stress, and this relationship is partially mediated by PsyCap. The findings from the moderated mediation analysis revealed that the mediation of PsyCap was moderated by LMX such that at the higher levels of LMX, the mediation effect of PsyCap on workout comes became stronger.

As the study did not cover all sectors, the results of this study should be interpreted with caution.

Embedded in the conservation of resources theory, this study adds to the knowledge of how abusive supervision and LMX jointly affect PsyCap, turnover intentions and perceived stress. The results of this study indicate that abusive supervision exerts its influence on work-related outcomes and highlights the importance of taking the quality of relationship (LMX) with supervisor and personal resources into consideration when making sense of the influence of abusive supervision with employee outcomes. The study extends the current research stream of abusive supervision research to one of the underrepresented developing Asian countries, India.