Leadership Research Summary:
• The study reports a systematic and critical review of abusive supervision research to provide a comprehensive catalogue of the correlates of abusive supervision (i.e., antecedents, outcomes, mediators, and moderators) and identify four major challenges facing the field.
• First, abusive supervision is conceptualized in a confused manner that conflates followers’ subjective evaluations of abuse with leaders’ behaviors. Second, researchers consider how conceptual confusion is reflected in and undermines dominant measurement tools. Third, the study identifies and critique overreliance on cross-sectional survey-based studies and vignette experiments, which vary considerably in the extent to which they can evidence causal effects. Fourth, researchers consider the fact that abusive supervision is a low base rate phenomenon (i.e., is rarely reported).
• Using novel and simulated data researchers demonstrate that most past research is ill-equipped to make claims about the effects of intermediate or high levels of abusive supervision. Throughout, researchers explain how each challenge limits past research and offer achievable recommendations for a fundamental rethink of abusive supervision.
• In the discussion, researchers synthesize the recommendations for rethinking the conceptualization, measurement, and empirical study of abusive supervision. Only by overcoming these challenges will future research be robust enough to provide meaningful theoretical advances and useful policy implications
Leadership Research Findings:
• The study reported a systematic and critical review of abusive supervision research. Alongside providing a comprehensive catalogue of the different correlates (antecedents, outcomes, mediators, moderators) of abusive supervision that serves as a useful map of empirical research in the field, researchers identified challenges facing the conceptualization, measurement, and empirical study of abusive supervision.
• Most importantly, however, the study provided achievable recommendations for addressing these challenges, which if enacted will serve to improve the veracity of abusive supervision research. Thus, although study’s review is critical of the typical abusive supervision study, researchers believe it is constructive and can contribute to improving and rethinking the study of one of the most disconcerting and therefore most important topics of organizational research: abuse of followers by leaders.
• Only through rigorous research can researchers achieve more definitive information regarding how frequent abusive supervision is, how to best select and train leaders to reduce abusive supervision, and how to help followers be resilient when faced with abusive supervision.