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Large organizations typically mandate that managers attend budget meetings and exchange budget reports with their immediate supervisor and budget staff. We explored whether such organization-mandated budgetary involvement is related to managers’ budgetary communication with their supervisor in terms of budgetary participation, budgetary explanation, and budgetary feedback. Questionnaire data from 148 managers employed by 94 different companies were analyzed with regression. Mandatory budget meetings with supervisor had a positive relationship with all three forms of budgetary communication with supervisor, and mandatory budget reports from supervisor had a positive relationship with budgetary explanation from supervisor. Mandatory budget meetings with budget staff had a positive relationship with both budgetary participation with supervisor and budgetary feedback from supervisor. Mandatory budget reports from budget staff had a negative relationship with all three forms of budgetary communication with supervisor. The results failed to support proposed relationships between mandatory budget reports to supervisor and budgetary participation with supervisor, and between mandatory budget reports from supervisor and budgetary explanation from supervisor. Implications of the results for future research and budgetary system design are discussed.

There are numerous existing resources which claim to discuss the most important factors a potential PhD student should consider when looking for a possible supervisor. Commonly discussed topics include the supervisors’ record and approach, but there is much more to finding a reciprocal and beneficial relationship. This chapter will address some of these less discussed factors to look for when selecting a supervisor, including sense of humor. This chapter will help the hopeful PhD student maneuver the uncomfortable − and often overwhelming − waters of selecting a supervisor by pointing out the questions students forget to ask, the character traits they don’t think to consider, and examples of supervision selection gone wrong. It starts with the often-confusing process of knowing where to start looking, then highlights five frequently ignored factors that deserve more consideration, and finishes with warning signs to look for that mark supervisors to avoid.

Is co-supervision (i.e., two or more supervisors) a blessing or a torture? While co-supervision enables doctoral students to embrace a greater breadth of expertise, studying under the supervision of two or more supervisors can also be frustrating, especially when they have different requirements and expectations. Co-supervision is sometimes like living on the edge of two “systems” of theories and paradigms. It is important for doctoral students to be academically, emotionally, and interpersonally prepared to maximize the value of co-supervision, which often requires special management skills and techniques. Based on the experiences and stories of doctoral students from Hong Kong, this chapter will provide practical tips to navigate co-supervision.

“I just finished my meeting with one supervisor and need to prepare for the other now!”

“I just finished my meeting with one supervisor and need to prepare for the other now!”

“I can learn different things from each supervisor. It is very helpful.”

“I can learn different things from each supervisor. It is very helpful.”

“I am quite confused! My supervisors have totally different stands on this issue.”

“I am quite confused! My supervisors have totally different stands on this issue.”

Does any of the comments ring a bell with you? If you studied or are studying for a doctoral degree in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, or Hong Kong, you are likely to find yourself in similar situations. With the development of distributed supervisory practice in higher education and the growing number of doctoral candidates, more and more doctoral students are likely to be supervised by two or more academics, that is, co-supervision.

We examine whether supervisor support and empathy moderate the relationship between customer injustice and employee display rule deviance through a reduction in employee anger.

Working adults (N = 214) completed an online survey assessing their experiences with customer injustice, feelings of anger, and the extent to which they deviated from emotional display rules over the past month. Participants also completed a measure of trait anger (a control variable), and they rated their supervisor’s general support and empathy.

Supervisor empathy (but not supervisor support) buffered the relationship between customer injustice and employee anger. In turn, reduced employee anger is related to lower display rule deviance. Country (United States vs. India) also moderated the effect of anger on display rule deviance; the relationship was stronger in India than in the United States.

Service industry employees typically are expected to regulate their emotional displays by displaying positive emotions and hiding negative emotions. Meeting these display rules is considered paramount to providing good service. Unfortunately, customers sometimes treat service employees in a disrespectful or unfair manner, and the resulting employee anger may cause employees to break emotional display rules. It is difficult to control customer behavior, but our results suggest that empathetic managers may help employees manage the negative emotions that result from customer mistreatment. Thus, selecting and training managers to show empathy may improve customer service by resulting in more resilient employees.

This chapter examines the miners’ occupational culture of planisa at the level of supervisor–worker relations. The chapter presents a tale of two frontline production supervisors or shift-bosses as they were called on the mine – Jimmy and Lee. In this context, the ability of the production supervisor to make a plan in ways that enhance the social organisation of the production process and people management is crucial to the development of a reciprocal working relationship. The chapter argues that planisa also entails a valuable social organisational skill through which frontline supervisors could effectively use to manage work group dynamics and team performance associated with teamworking, intra-team conflict, effort-bargain and resistance.

The chapter reveals that by ‘getting on and getting by’ with his charges – going an extra mile to making plan for his mining teams wherever possible – Jimmy created a working environment that enabled his subordinates to achieve their production targets and increase their capacity to earn the much-desired productivity and safety bonuses. The case of Jimmy and his charges highlights the role of the frontline supervisor as a vital agent of workplace change that elicits worker cooperation and support for new work processes, not for the sake of pleasing management but in ways that benefit and make sense to them – going above and beyond organisational requirements to achieve the organisational performance goals at the point of production. On the contrary, the case of Lee, another frontline supervisor, demonstrates the opposite and highlights the harmfulness of poor supervisor–worker relations to the achievement of organisational, employee and team performance goals.

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.

Purpose – Accounting research has long shown the effect of subjectivity in performance evaluation. This study investigates one form of subjectivity in performance evaluation: flexibility in weighting performance measures examining decisions made by supervisors about weighting. Empirical studies show that the performance-measure weights are only partially consistent with the predictions of the agency theory and they are a still outstanding issue.

Methodology/approach – We develop an experiment to analyse supervisor decision-making, manipulating two factors: internal organisational interdependence and the level of managerial performance. We derive hypotheses along with both economic and behavioural approaches. The economic approach is based on agency theory predictions and the controllability principle while the behavioural approach is drawn on the organisational justice theory. We argue that in low interdependence contexts the supervisor's decision confirms the agency theory predictions, while in high interdependence conditions weighting decisions could be driven by behavioural considerations of fairness perceptions of the evaluation process and the level of managerial performance.

Findings – We find that in low interdependence contexts the supervisor's decision confirms the agency theory predictions, while in high interdependence contexts it does not. The results indicate that the supervisor's decision stems from the integration of economic and behavioural perspectives.

Research and social implications – The theoretical framework can be useful for interpreting the supervisor decision-making and the weighting process.

Originality – The economic and behavioural approaches allow us to understand flexibility in weighting performance measures suggesting that, in addition to economic considerations, a behavioural perspective may also be relevant in explaining subjective weighting.

The malicious impulse is a phenomenon that lies in the theoretical and ontological space between emotion and action. In this chapter, we probe this space. In the empirical part of this work, we evaluate the hypothesis that middle-level supervisors will be more likely than non-supervisory workers and top-level supervisors to report an impulse to “hurt someone you work with” (i.e., maliciousness).

Data are from a cross-sectional survey of a representative sample of employed Toronto residents in 2004–2005.

Results from logistic regression analyses show that when job characteristics are controlled, the estimated difference between middle-level supervisors and workers in other hierarchical positions reporting the impulse to harm a coworker is statistically significant. Moreover, the difference between middle-level supervisors and other workers persist after controls for anger about work and job-related stress.

In discussing our results, we focus on factors that might generate the observed associations, and on how Bourdieusian theory may be used to interpret the social patterning of impulses in general, and malicious impulses in particular. We also discuss the implications of our findings for emotional intelligence in the workplace.

Purpose: Although there has been increasing scholarly attention regarding the unethical concerns of prosocial behavior at work, scarce research has been done to conceptualize this type of compassionate behavior. To address this research gap, we identify the unethical concerns of a supervisor's compassion and address how this compassion, when combined with unethical implications, impacts subordinates' unethical behavior. Study Design/Methodology/Approach: We drew on sensemaking theory to develop a theoretical model and a four-quadrant taxonomy explaining how subordinate's interpretation of the context and supervisors' actions affected their unethical behavior through emotional responses and shared moral identity with supervisors. Findings: Our propositions suggest that subordinates' different roles in supervisors' compassionate process – the sufferer (receiver) or bystander (witness), and supervisors' unethical behavior at the domain of private or public activities impact their interpretations of meaning and shape their corresponding emotional responses, moral identity, and unethical behavior. Originality/Value: Our theoretical model contributes to a wholistic understanding of compassion at work by identifying the unethical implications of compassion appraisal. It depicts the complex process of how leaders' contradictory information shapes employees' unethical behavior. Research Limitations: The theoretical model and propositions lack the support of empirical data.