Supervisors' emotional exhaustion and abusive supervision: The moderating roles of perceived subordinate performance and supervisor self‐monitoring

By Catherine K. Lam, Frank Walter, Xu Huang. 2017

103 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Drawing from conservation of resources theory, this study aims to create new knowledge on the antecedents of abusive supervision. Results across 2 independent field studies within a manufacturing context (Study 1) and a customer service context (Study 2) consistently demonstrated a 3-way interaction pattern, such that supervisors' experiences of emotional exhaustion, perceived subordinate performance, and self-monitoring were jointly associated with subordinates' abusive supervision perceptions. A supplementary scenario experiment further corroborated this pattern. Together, the present studies illustrate a contingency model of abusive supervision's origins, highlighting emotional exhaustion as an important risk factor that is particularly likely to trigger abusive behavior among supervisors with lower (rather than higher) self-monitoring who are faced with a relatively underperforming subordinate. As such, this research advances the abusive supervision literature by offering new insights into the complex resource conservation processes that may give rise to subordinates' abuse perceptions.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4a7bef59d5be3c4d055232b756dcc4019f614586

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Conservation of Resources in the Organizational Context: The Reality of Resources and Their Consequences (2018, result): “F or p er so na l u se o nl y. Lam et al. (2017) report the results of two studies that find support for a nuanced response to emotional exhaustion whereby supervisors appear more likely to engage in abusive behavior toward subordinates (measured through the subordinates’ evaluations of abusive…”
Job characteristics and teacher well-being: the mediation of teacher self-monitoring and teacher self-efficacy (2019, background): “High self-monitors exhibit both willingness and effectiveness in expression management while lower self-monitoring appears to be associated with the abusive behaviours of supervisors under stress (Lam et al., 2017; Scott et al., 2012).”