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Integrating balance theory and social identify theory, this paper proposes a multilevel model to explain how abusive supervision climate of team impacts the relationship among team members as well as subordinates’ behavior towards their teammates, especially organizational citizenship behavior (OCB).

A survey was conducted to collect two-wave and multi-source data from 398 employees nested in 106 teams from Chinese high-technology companies. Hierarchical linear modeling was conducted to examine the theoretical model.

The results indicate that there is an inverted U-shape association between abusive supervision climate and subordinates’ OCB towards coworker; team member exchange (TMX) mediates their inverted U-shaped link. Furthermore, we confirm that coworker support plays a vitally moderating role upon the curvilinear link of abusive supervision climate (ASC)–TMX; specifically, when employees perceive low coworker support, negative relations between ASC and TMX will be stronger.

This study identifies team members’ advantageous and adverse relational response to shared threat of ASC and examines coworker support as a moderator of ASC, which provides valuable insights into when and why employees tend to cooperate with their teammates to jointly confront their leader’s abuse and highlights the importance of coworkers, thus enabling organizations to deeply understand the wider influences of ASC on interpersonal relationship between team members.

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.

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.

Drawing on the conservation of resources theory, the present study aims to design and explore the influence of abusive supervision and coworker incivility on turnover intention among frontline employees (FLEs). Besides the mediating effects of work stress between abusive supervision and turnover intention, coworker incivility and turnover intention also be explored.

Data from 311 FLEs are collected by a self-administered structured questionnaire and analyzed by confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation model.

The empirical results established that abusive supervision and coworker incivility significantly predicts work stress and work stress significantly predicts turnover intention. Abusive supervision significantly predicts a positive relationship with turnover intention, whereas coworker incivility with turnover intention is vis-à-vis. Besides, abusive supervision and coworker incivility significantly predict turnover intention via work stress. The study further illustrated the control variables, e.g. education, experience, and proactive personality of FLEs.

The study finds abusive supervision and coworker incivility as stressors in the emerging economy for FLEs. However, coworker incivility on turnover intention cannot predict as expected because the roles of the supervisor and coworker are different in this context.

The continuous support of supervisors and coworkers can reduce the stress and consequences of reducing the intention of turnover of FLEs. The concerns can enhance their support by using respect and credit for work, maintaining privacy, providing proper feedback, being sensible to the performance, and entitlement to any achievement. They also suggest ensuring a work environment of privacy, fair treatment, importance to suggestions, and ascertaining punishment for any colleague's mistreatment.

The frontliners always contribute a large pie of output for any organization. Supervisors and coworkers impact the day-to-day life of FLEs.

As a study on FLEs in the context of evolving economy, the investigation fulfills the inconsistencies of the previous result with the mediating role of work stress with a strong theoretical base.

Knowledge is the source of competitive advantage, but when shared at all levels. Unfortunately, there is a universal unruly present in the form of knowledge hiding at employees’ level, but the causes and remedies are still vague as past studies have rarely investigated the causes of daily knowledge hiding behavior. Against this backdrop, this study aims to entail a daily diary method investigation of the role of daily abusive supervision in daily employees’ knowledge hiding through the mediation of dehumanization and moderation of psychological capital.

The data for this study is collected using a daily diary method approach, which estimates the daily workplace events and their continuous influence on employees’ feelings (i.e. dehumanization) and actions (knowledge hiding). The daily responses of 279 respondents were considered useful for analysis purposes.

The findings of the study revealed that the daily events of abusive supervision have both direct and indirect (through dehumanization) influence on employees’ daily knowledge hiding behavior. Moreover, psychosocial capital has a significant conditional influence in the relationships of negative workplace treatments (abusive supervision and dehumanization) and their outcomes (i.e. knowledge hiding).

The study provides some theoretical and practical insights by providing the explanatory and coping mechanism between continuous abusive supervision and daily knowledge hiding behavior.

There is a dearth of literature that has focused on daily episodes of abusive supervision, dehumanization and knowledge hiding behavior. Furthermore, the moderating role of psychological capital has also been rarely investigated.

The purpose of this research is to examine the narratives of victims of abusive supervision. We explore the meaning or “lessons” victims derive from those experiences and how they shape the victims’ views of self, work and organization in relation to navigating their subsequent jobs.

We analyzed how appraisals of supervisory abuse transform victims’ narratives and their consequent work attitudes through sensemaking processes. Semi-structured interviews with the past victims of abusive supervision generated a four-stage model of how sensemaking shapes victims’ future work attitudes. Our interpretations were guided through narrative thematic analysis based on the constructionist approach.

Victims’ lessons learned are predominantly framed by their retrospective post-event appraisal of abuse (based on its severity) once individuals are no longer subject to abusive supervision. With greater distance from the abuse, victims can process the abuse and better understand the motivation of the abuser, enabling the process of causal attributions. These attributions further shape victims’ narratives and future work attitudes through a complex interplay of retrospective and prospective sensemaking mechanisms. The victims broadly reported proactive (with higher self-awareness and endurance) and reactive (self-protection, and emotional scars) lessons. A four-stage model was proposed based on our findings.

Abusive supervision remains a persistent issue experienced by many individuals at some point in their working life. However, little is known about how victims make sense of the event post-abuse and how this sense-making guides their future work behaviors. Understanding this phenomenon provides insight into how employees navigate through adversity and construct a more positive future. The contribution of this narrative inquiry is threefold. First, it explores how individual appraisals of supervisory abuse frame their (1) mechanisms of narrative construction; and (2) future work attitudes. Second, our findings demonstrate how narrative construction is a fluid process often informed by the process of retrospective and prospective sensemaking. Finally, our research suggests two broader categories of lessons that victims internalize and carry forward to their subsequent jobs.

Drawing on conservation of resources theory, this study aims to develop a resource-based model depicting a decreased level of psychological resourcefulness – relational energy, as a novel explanatory mechanism that accounts for the harm of abusive supervision, and we further investigate the role of leader humor as a boundary condition.

We applied multilevel path analysis to test our hypotheses with three-time-point survey data collected from 226 supervisor-employee dyads in a telecommunication company in China across six months.

Our results show that abusive supervision is negatively related to employee relational energy, leading to a subsequent decline in employee job performance. The predictions of the depleting effects get alleviated by leader humor.

This study foregrounds the importance of employee relationship management in the workplace and reveals that some abusive supervisors may manage to sustain employee performance and relational energy by using humor in their interactions, which necessitates immediate intervention.

These findings offer novel insights into the deleterious impact of abusive supervision by demonstrating the critical role of relational energy in dyadic interactions. We also reveal the potential dark side of leader humor in the context of abuse in the workplace.

This study aims to explore the adverse impacts of abusive supervision on helping behaviors among employees, as mediating by intention to leave and moderating by Islamic work ethics (IWE).

A quantitative approach was employed, and the sample consisted of 283 nurses working in various public sector hospitals in Pakistan. The data analysis was conducted using SPSS and AMOS with the PROCESS macro.

The results suggest that abusive supervision diminishes helping behavior among nurses. Additionally, the study reveals that intention to leave mediates the relationship of abusive supervision and nurses' helping behavior. Moreover, the introduction of IWE as a boundary condition reveals that the mediated link is weaker when IWE is higher, and vice versa.

This study provides valuable insights for hospital authorities to develop intervention strategies and policies aimed at reducing abusive supervision in hospitals. Hospital management should also be aware of the detrimental effects of abusive supervision on nurses' helping behaviors, which can be mitigated by promoting ethical values aligned with IWE.

This study makes a valuable contribution to the limited research on the link between abusive supervision and helping behaviors in hospital settings. It offers new perspectives by incorporating the Conservation of Resources theory, particularly within the healthcare sector. Furthermore, this research expands the current knowledge by investigating the mediating influence of intention to leave and the moderating effect of IWE in mitigating the adverse impact of abusive supervision on nurses' helping behavior in Pakistan's public sector hospitals.

Using the lenses of social exchange and reactance theories, this study examines the relationships between abusive supervision and both turnover intentions and job satisfaction. The moderating role of employee depression in the relationship between abusive supervision and these specific work outcomes is also investigated, by incorporating the conservation of resources theory.

Quantitative data were collected from a sample of 221 frontline retail employees, across shopping malls in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad. A 3-step multiple hierarchical regression analysis was performed to test the relationships.

The findings provided support for the propositions that abusive supervision predicts job satisfaction and turnover intentions, respectively. Employee depression moderated the relationship between abusive supervision and job satisfaction but did not moderate the relationship between abusive supervision and turnover intentions.

While existing research has explored the relationships between abusive supervision, job satisfaction and turnover intentions, limited studies have investigated the moderating role of employee depression. This study contributes to understanding this pervasive workplace issue by investigating a relatively unexplored moderating effect.

Cyberloafing is an organization-directed counterproductive work behavior (CWB). One stream of literature deems cyberloafing to be bad for organizations and their employees, while another suggests cyberloafing is a coping response to stressful work events. Our work contributes to the latter stream of literature. The key objective of our study is to examine whether cyberloafing could be a means to cope with a stressful work event-abusive supervision, and if yes, what mediating and boundary conditions are involved. For this investigation, the authors leveraged the Stressor-Emotion-CWB theory which posits that individuals engage in CWB to cope with the negative affect generated by the stressors and that this relationship is moderated at the first stage by personality traits.

Using a multi-wave survey design, the authors collected data from 357 employees working in an Indian IT firm. Results revealed support for three out of the four hypotheses.

Based on the Stressor-Emotion-CWB theory, the authors found that work-related negative affect fully mediated the positive relationship between abusive supervision and cyberloafing, and work locus of control (WLOC) moderated the positive relationship between abusive supervision and work-related negative affect. The authors did not find any evidence of a direct relationship between abusive supervision and cyberloafing. Also, the positive indirect relationship between abusive supervision and cyberloafing through work-related negative affect was moderated at the first stage by the WLOC such that the indirect effect was stronger (weaker) at high (low) levels of WLOC.

This work demonstrates that cyberloafing could be a way for employees to cope with their abusive supervisors.