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On the basis of affective events theory, this study aims to examine the connection between work-related events (i.e. supervisor role ambiguity and role conflicts) and abusive supervision via emotion (i.e. supervisor frustration). This study also examines the moderating role of supervisor personality traits (i.e. neuroticism and conscientiousness).

This study collected lagged and multisource field data (472 subordinates and supervisors dyads) from the service organizations.

The data collected supported majority of this study’s hypothesized relationships regarding determinants of abusive supervision.

This study underlines what triggers supervisor abuse. This study also enables organizations with the intervention opportunity to reduce the effects of supervisor role ambiguity, role conflict, negative emotions and personality on triggering abusive supervision.

Prior research on abusive supervision has extensively focused on its outcomes, leaving a noteworthy research gap about what triggers abusive supervision. To fill this important gap in leadership literature, this study proposed and tested a research model of determinants of supervisor abuse. Thus, this study contributes to leadership and abusive supervision research. Implications and future research directions are discussed.

The existing literature on abusive supervision, defined as a perception by subordinates that their supervisor displays hostility toward them (but falling short of physical abuse), is deficient insofar as it fails to account for workgroup differences in employees' perceptions of abusive supervision. We therefore sought to study such differences, which refer to as “abusive supervision dispersion (ASD).”

We interviewed 40 employees from a variety of organizations in Australia, focusing on the role of affective events in ASD dynamics, with a view to understanding how this phenomenon relates to individual and team processes.

We found that ASD stimulates employees to harbor negative emotions and resentment toward their supervisor, causing them to perceive even positive events negatively. We found further that, while low ASD facilitates team-member exchange by forcing abused members to band together resulting in low team conflict, high dispersion facilitates formation of subgroups and high team conflict.

These findings illuminate the paradoxical nature of ASD and suggest that employees experience dispersion through three paradoxes: (1) dispersion paradox, (2) resentment paradox, and (3) team paradox. Overall, these findings suggest that subordinates' perceptions of high ASD are associated with detrimental impacts on team performance.

The present research aims to empirically test the “Barriers to abusive supervision model” to find how employee-related (core self-evaluations) and situational factors (perceived job dependency) make an employee trapped in the spiral of supervisory abuse. In addition, the work–family spillover lens is used to explain how employees' retaliation is targeted at their families in response to abuse from their bosses.

The current study has employed a three-wave longitudinal moderated mediation design and analysed data from 265 employees working in the hospitality industry of Pakistan.

The results of this study have shown that low core-self evaluations put employees in a spiral of supervisory abuse and they instil aggression towards their families. This association is further strengthened when employees are dependent on their job.

This study is one of the first to use the “Barriers to Abusive supervision” model to answer who and in which conditions tend to trap in the spiral of abuse and integrate the work-to-family interface model for elaborating the outcomes to the family domain.

Supervisory abuse is a form of destructive leadership. Research has continued to document many deleterious consequences associated with such improper behavior at work. This study further extends its consequences by testing a model linking abusive supervision to job apathy through a climate of fear.

This study drew on affective events theory in investigating the role of the climate of fear in instances where casual workers perceive abuse in commercial banks. A three-wave and three-week time lag approach was adopted for data collection from 245 casual workers in southeastern Nigeria.

Results from partial least squares structural equation modeling supported the model by showing that abusive supervision had a direct positive relationship with the climate of fear and job apathy, while the climate of fear related positively to job apathy. Results also revealed that the climate of fear partially mediated the relationship between abusive supervision and job apathy.

Managers can be trained to become more supportive and less abusive to address the problem of abusive supervision. Furthermore, casual workers are encouraged to report any abuse from their manager to higher authorities inside or outside their workplace.

This study sheds new insights and advances the abusive supervision literature by investigating the climate of fear as the underlying mechanism.

The study aims to investigate the mediating roles of leadership identification and organizational identification linking abusive supervision to employees' turnover intention.

Using a self-administer survey design, data were collected from 229 nursing workforce employed in hospitals located in Karachi.

The research findings show that abusive supervision has a considerably positive influence on turnover intention. The findings also show that abusive supervision negatively affects nurses' leadership identification and organizational identification. Leadership identification and organizational identification were found to be negatively related to nurses' turnover intention. Finally, leadership identification and organizational identification were found to parallelly mediate the relationship between abusive supervision and turnover intention.

This study helped uncover the previously unknown parallel mediating mechanism of organizational identification and leadership identification. Additionally, abusive supervision was found to negatively affect employees' leadership identification.

Drawing on the dual process model of ideology and prejudice, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether, how and when a supervisor's Machiavellianism leads to subordinates' perceptions of abusive supervision. In doing so, the authors also explore the mediating role of the supervisor's competitive world views and the moderating role of subordinates' performance on this relationship.

The theoretical model was tested using three sources of data from supervisors, their subordinates and the organization. Hierarchical linear model analysis was run on supervisor and subordinate dyadic data for testing whether subordinates' performance moderated the mediated relationships or not.

The results suggest that the supervisors' competitive worldviews explain the positive link between their Machiavellianism and subordinates' perceptions of abusive supervision. The results highlight that the mediation effect of supervisors' competitive worldviews on the link between their Machiavellianism and their subordinates' perceptions of abusive supervision is more pronounced when subordinates' performance is low than when it is high.

This research contributes to the authors’ knowledge of the link between supervisors' Machiavellianism and abusive supervision, and how the toxic influence of their Machiavellianism is mediated by supervisors' competitive worldviews.

The study contributes to the literature on abusive supervision and personality by studying the role of personality as an antecedent of abusive supervision. Further, this study used subordinates' performance as a contextual variable for understanding abusive supervision.

Goal orientation shapes employees’ approach to and interpretation of workplace aspects such as supervisors’ behavior. However, research has not fully examined the effect of goal orientation as an antecedent of abusive supervision. Drawing from victim precipitation theory, this study aims to fill this research gap by investigating how employees’ goal orientation influences their perception of abusive supervision.

Two studies were conducted to test the hypotheses. In Study 1, 181 employees in 45 departments participated in the survey, and multilevel confirmatory factor analysis, two-level path model and polynomial regression were used. In Study 2, 108 working adults recruited from a professional online survey platform participated in a two-wave time-lagged survey. Confirmatory factor analysis, hierarchical linear regression and polynomial regression were used.

This study found that employees’ learning goal orientation was negatively related to their perception of abusive supervision. In contrast, performance-avoidance goal orientation was positively related to their perception of abusive supervision, whereas performance-approach goal orientation was unrelated to this perception. Moreover, employees’ perception of abusive supervision was greater when learning and performance-approach goal orientation alignment occurred at lower rather than higher levels, and when performance-avoidance and performance-approach goal orientation alignment occurred at higher rather than lower levels.

This research identified two novel victim traits as antecedents of abusive supervision – employees’ learning goal orientation and performance-avoidance goal orientation. Furthermore, adopting a multiple goal perspective, the authors examined the combined effects of goal orientation on employees’ perception of abusive supervision.

This study is designed to bridge a gap in the existing leadership communication literature by delving into lesser-explored facets of the field. It particularly concentrates on investigating how the verbal aggressiveness of supervisors influences various aspects of the workplace, including workplace emotional culture, the quality of employee–organization relationships (EORs) and the prevalence of counterproductive work behaviors (CWB).

This study employed a quantitative research design to investigate the impact of supervisors' verbal aggressiveness on employee and organizational outcomes. The data were collected from 392 full-time employees across various organizations and industries in the USA using a self-report questionnaire. The researchers used structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze the data and test hypotheses.

The findings of this study showed that supervisors' verbal aggressiveness had a significant positive association with negative emotional culture and employee CWB. However, it had no direct impact on employee–organization relationships. The effect of supervisor verbal aggressiveness on employee CWB was found to be mediated by a negative team-level emotional culture.

This study advances the literature on leadership communication by highlighting the detrimental influence of the dark side of leadership communication. More specifically, by identifying negative emotional culture and employee CWB as the direct outcomes of supervisor verbal aggressiveness, the authors add to the existing theoretical knowledge on verbal aggressiveness in the workplace. Additionally, this study provides empirical evidence of the impact of a negative emotional culture on eliciting employees' CWBs and diminishing relationship quality, adding to the body of knowledge on why managing emotional culture is crucial for organizations and workgroups.

Despite the literature on subordinates' destructive responses to abusive leadership, an emerging body of literature proposes that subordinates may react constructively to abusive supervision under certain conditions. The authors contribute to this line of research by proposing and testing the moderating effects of performance-approach and -avoidance goal orientation on the relationship between abusive supervision and task performance, and by testing work effort as a mechanism underlying this moderating effect.

The study hypotheses were tested in two studies. In Study 1 (field survey, N = 230), the moderation hypotheses were tested. Study 2 (experiment, N = 116) extended Study 1 and examined the mediated moderation model.

The study empirical evidence from the two studies showed that (1) abusive supervision was more positively related to an employee's task performance when that employee's performance-approach goal orientation was high (vs low), (2) abusive supervision was not more positively related to task performance when performance-avoidance goal orientation was high (vs low) and (3) the employee's work effort mediated the moderating effect of performance-approach goal orientation.

This research suggests that organizations and subordinates should be aware of the positive contextual role of performance-approach goal orientation, which may shape subordinates' subsequent work behavior in response to supervisors' hostility, and should invest more time and effort in reinforcing subordinates' performance-approach goal orientation.

This study has identified a new condition and offers new evidence of the potential functional effect of abusive supervision. Specifically, the study finding of the positive moderating role of performance-approach goal orientation adds to the literature examining when abused subordinates respond constructively to abusive supervision. The study analysis of the mediating effect of work effort further reveals the mechanism of this effect.

Abusive supervision provokes subordinates’ interpersonal deviant behavior. It is, therefore, essential to explore the contingent factors of this relationship. Drawing upon gender role theory, this study aims to explore how subordinate and leader genders moderate the relationship between abusive supervision and subordinate interpersonal deviance. Furthermore, this study posits a three-way interaction effect of abusive supervision with leader and subordinate genders on interpersonal deviance.

Multisource survey data were collected from 45 supervisors and 170 subordinates in eight companies in China. The data were analyzed using the PROCESS macro in SPSS.

The results showed that the positive relationship between abusive supervision and interpersonal deviance was stronger among female leaders than male leaders. Furthermore, the authors found a three-way interaction effect between abusive supervision and leader and subordinate genders on subordinates’ interpersonal deviance. Compared with female subordinates, male subordinates engaged in significantly more interpersonal deviance when experiencing abusive supervision from a female leader than from a male leader.

The authors reveal that gender differences exist in the effect of abusive supervision on subordinates’ interpersonal deviant behavior. Furthermore, the authors demonstrate that subordinate and leader genders jointly influence the effect of abusive supervision. Finally, the findings extend the literature on gender’s moderating effects from constructive and neutral leader behaviors to destructive leader behaviors.