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Antecedents of Abusive Supervision: a Meta-analytic Review

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Abstract

Recent studies of organizational behavior have witnessed a growing interest in unethical leadership, leading to the development of abusive supervision research. Given the increasing interest in the causes of abusive supervision, this study proposes an organizing framework for its antecedents and tests it using meta analysis. Based on an analysis of effect sizes drawn from 74 studies, comprising 30,063 participants, the relationship between abusive supervision and different antecedent categories are examined. The results generally support expected relationships across the four categories of abusive antecedents, including: supervisor related antecedents, organization related antecedents, subordinate related antecedents, and demographic characteristics of both supervisors and subordinates. In addition, possible moderators that can also influence the relationships between abusive supervision and its antecedents are also examined. The significance and implications of different level factors in explaining abusive supervision are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Schyns and Schilling (2013) conducted a meta-analysis on destructive leadership, which contains abusive supervision as one type of destructive leadership.

  2. A summary of studies and sample characteristics can be provided by the corresponding author upon request.

  3. One coder is the author of this paper. The other coder is an expert in organizational behavior researcher who has sufficient knowledge of abusive supervision.

  4. Five demographic variables in Fig. 2 are excluded because they are normally considered as control variables in the extant literature.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Yumeng Yue for research assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Institute of Economics and Management, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, China

    Yucheng Zhang

  2. Department of Leadership and Management, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

    Timothy C. Bednall

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  1. Yucheng Zhang
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  2. Timothy C. Bednall
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Correspondence to Yucheng Zhang.

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Zhang, Y., Bednall, T.C. Antecedents of Abusive Supervision: a Meta-analytic Review. J Bus Ethics 139, 455–471 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2657-6

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