User:MGMT90018 2015S2 abusive supervision/sandbox

'''This sandbox is being edited as part of a class assignment. The original content was copied from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abusive_supervision'''

Abusive supervision is most commonly studied in the context of the workplace, although can arise in other areas such as household and school. "Abusive supervision has been investigated as an antecedent to negative subordinate workplace outcome". It is defined as subordinates’ perceptions of the extent to the supervisors’ "hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviors" that engaged in the workplace, except physical contacts"(Tepper, 2000, p.178). The attributions of abusive supervision is bilateral, which includes the both sides of employees and employers . Abusive supervision could lead lots of negative consequences such as social undermining, psychological distress, problem drinking and workplace deviance.

Perceptions of abusive supervision
During intrapersonal attribution processes, individuals form attributions for a certain perceived outcome. In the context of abusive supervision, employees attribute their perceptions of being abused to certain causes. There are three dimensions of the perception of the abusive supervision: consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness. The three variables determine the particularity of an employee’s perception of abusive supervision which accounts for the particular attributions that the person tends to make.

Consensus
Consensus indicates the degree to which an employee believes the abusive supervision that he or she goes through is common to other employees. Consensus is high when the same type of outcome happens to other employees as well and low when the outcome is exclusive to this employee.

Consistency
Consistency refers to the degree to which an employee routinely experiences abusive supervision, and with the belief that this kind of situation is going to continue in the future. Consistency is high when the abusive supervision occurs regularly, and is very likely to go on till the future. Consistency is low when the abusive supervision doesn’t occur on a regular basis, and the employee who has experienced the abusive supervision normally will not expect the same type of outcome to repeat soon.

Distinctiveness
Distinctiveness indicates the degree to which the outcome of abusive supervision happens to an individual under certain circumstance. Distinctiveness is high when an employee seldom experiences the same type of treatment elsewhere. Conversely, distinctiveness is low when the abusive supervision happens to an employee in various situations, for instance, in his or her previous employment.

Attributions from employee's perspective
Based on the informational cues of consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness of the perceptions of abusive supervision, individuals make internal, external or relational attributions.

Internal attributions
Internal attributions reﬂect employees’ beliefs that their personal characteristics or behaviors are the cause of the outcome of abusive supervision. Employees are likely to make internal attributions when they perceive that the other employees who are supervised by the supervisor do not receive the same kind of abusive treatment that they experience. They feel treated differently and conclude that the mistreatment is exclusive to them (low consensus). This type of attribution can be reinforced if they are treated poorly by the supervisor routinely (high consistency) and they have perceived abuse from supervisors in past situations (low distinctiveness). The pattern of low consensus, high consistency and low distinctiveness can lead employees to attribute the outcome to something about themselves, for instance, personality and ability. The abusive supervision might occur due to the supervisors’ lack of sufficient self-control. Furthermore, supervisors lack certain motivations to regulate their own behavior due to their absolute administrative power relative to their subordinates, which means they are not afraid of offending their inferiors when they think they are obliged to do so at such positions. Sometimes, the supervisors are just not realising how tremendous and negative the influence of their acts would be for certain individuals who are high in neuroticism.

External attributions
External attributions occur when individuals regard the supervisor as the main cause of their perceptions of abusive supervision. This type of attribution is likely to be formed under the circumstances that the abusive supervision is common to other employees (high consensus), the supervisor regularly abuses the employees and makes the employees expect the poor treatment to continue in the future (high consistency), and the employees have not typically received supervisory abuse in previous employments (high distinctiveness). In external attributions, individuals usually blame the supervisor to be responsible for the negative outcome of abusive supervision.

Relational attributions
Relational attributions locate the cause of the perceived abusive supervision within the unique relationship an employee has with a certain supervisor. This type of attribution is often made by an employee who has not been typically abused by any other supervisor but the one who routinely gives him or her poor treatment (high distinctiveness and high consistency). Besides, the employee perceives that no one else receives this kind of abuse from the supervisor (low consensus). On the premise that the perception of abusive supervision consists of low consensus, high consistency and high distinctiveness, the employee may think there is something wrong with the relationship with the supervisor. Thus, a relational attribution is made to explain the particular situation.

Learning effect
Based on social learning theory, abusive supervision from a team supervisor's own supervisor (i.e., a department supervisor) can directly arouse the team supervisor's abusive behaviors. Social learning theory suggests that people learn how to understand external stimulus and react in a certain way by observing and imitating, so team supervisors tend to carefully observe their supervisors' behaviours and learn how they should behave accordingly.

Broadening the existing study for the learning effect of supervisors' behaviours, individuals may imitate not only good but also poor supervisors’ behaviours. Supervisors show abusive behaviours in part due to learning from role models in a social environment, and supervisors’ abusive behaviours are developed by the similar behaviours of those people who are in higher status positions. Specifically, when team supervisors perceive that abusive supervision from their department supervisors frequently occurs, they are inclined to think that showing abusive behaviours to their own team members is appropriate and acceptable and thereby engaging in abusive supervision frequently. If team supervisors observe little or no abusive behaviours from their department supervisors, team supervisors may understand that it is not correct to display abusive behaviours. As a result, they tend to follow the example of their department supervisors and avoid to abuse their own team members.

Hierarchy and power
Employers have enormous power to allocate important organizational resources, assign employees to complete their job tasks, evaluate employees’ performance and engage in critical personnel decision-making (e.g. salary, promotion and training opportunities) in the working environment. Many researches have revealed that, as a result of their higher hierarchical statuses and stronger decisional power, employers tend to display various abusive behaviours, including deriding, bellowing, and threatening employees; taking credit for employees' accomplishments; and blaming unfavourable outcomes on employees’ personal ingredients .

Social Undermining
Social undermining can arise from abusive supervision, such as when a supervisor displays negative actions and this will lead to "flow downhill"; a supervisor is perceived as abusive.

Researches show that "abusive supervision is a subjective assessment made by subordinates regarding their supervisors" behavior towards them over a period of time. For example abusive supervision includes a "boss demeaning, belittling, or invading privacy of the subordinate.

Hostile attribution bias is an extra punitive mentality where individuals tend to project blame on others. Researchers wanted to see how hostile attribution bias can moderate the relationship between perceptions of psychological contract violation and subordinates’ perceptions of abusive supervision. Undermining does arise with abusive supervision, which affects families and aggression; they believe that there is a stronger positive relationship between experiences of psychological contract violation and subordinates’ reports of abuse. It suggests that when someone has a negative work environment, it will affect their emotional training ground where this would result in negative home encounters. The findings from this study show that abused subordinates' family members reported a higher incidence of undermining in their home. When this occurs, complications arise at both home and work. Workplace abuse may be spawning negative interpersonal relations in the home, which may contribution to a downward spiral of relationships in both spheres.

Abusive supervision can lead to a life dissatisfaction and work-family conflict. When a subordinate is being abused, it can cause negative consequences to their family as the subordinate starts undermining their family members. The undermining can arise from displaced aggression which is "redirection of a [person’s] harm doing behavior from a primary to a secondary target" (Tedeschi & Norman, 1985, p. 30). According to the transactional model of stress, it was suggested that people who experienced anxiety distress will be more likely to eliminate negative feelings by adapting emotion-focused coping behaviours. Indeed, research has shown that people’s action of undermining others are an explanation of stress reduction or ‘blowing off steam’.

Hence, 'when someone above you puts you down', one starts to think that one should be put down by one's family members. As subordinates are unlikely to confront or fight back to their supervisors, they may choose to express aggression base on their control. Therefore, in displacing their negatives feelings and aggression, people perceive that their mood would improve and frustrations can be reduced, meanwhile additional stress can be removed.

Studies also illustrated the negative effects of family undermining and home-life connections. For example, the negative stress suffered from work by one spouse adversely affects the other. Research also showed that husband’s stress from job were positively linked with wife’s strain. This explains the social undermining situation: “behaviours directed toward a target person…displaying negative affect and negative evaluations of the person” (Westman & Vinokur, 1998, p.140).

In addition, similar research has also focused on victims of abusive supervision and their displayed aggression on innocent third parties. In the absence of abusive behaviour of an initial provocation, there was little or no effect on trivial and secondary triggering events. Yet, when they followed an initial provocation of the subject, the same triggering events react very harshly towards the experimenter. This study indicates that abusive supervision is emotionally damaging for victims, this negative effects will transmit to other members in the society especially their family members, in a form via increased argument , unstable mood states , and conflictual interactions. When the family members respond by involving the victims in an argument, meaning that the event is triggered as it’s indicated by Pedersen and colleagues (2000). Aggressive actions taken by the subordinates would deteriorate family relationships, and diminish partner or family member’s sense of self-worth.

Psychological distress
Abusive supervision also leads to a greater psychological distress for victims, this involves dysfunctional thoughts and emotions, such as depression, anxiety and emotional exhaustion. Types of psychological distress can result in decreased productivity, burnout, health complaints and higher turnover.

Abusive supervision also leads to negative feelings of employees’ position and personal contribution in the organization as well as potential dissatisfaction with their jobs and intention to quit. Abused employees are more likely to suffer from mental distress, anxiety and alienation from their jobs.

Psychological distress can have a negative impacts on individuals' own sleeping patterns, this in turn affects workers' productivity and could contribute to organisation’s health care costs. According to research, the annual cost due to employees’ depression has been estimated to $50 billion for medical treatment and $44 billion for employee absence and reduction in performance for the U.S. organisations.

Study has found that people who have been abused by supervisors tend to maintain unwanted relationships by using regulative maintenance tactics, that is, creating psychological or physical distance between themselves and their abusive supervisors. Employees tend to think that the avoidance behaviours can eliminate discomfort feelings under the threatening conditions, as people are generally unwilling to confront unless the action they take will be effective and not personally costly. In addition, it is suggested that avoidance behaviours may be negatively reinforced in the short term, but it produces favourable emotional states rather than long-term damage. However, as a result, the use of regulative maintenance tactics exacerbates psychological distress under abusive supervision.

According to Harvey et al. (2007), it has been found that the use of ingratiation by employees could minimise job strain due to abusive supervision, as subordinates tend to frequently use flattery tactics in order to influence supervisor’s behaviour and attitudes. This gives subordinates a sense of control and the technique would generally make supervisors to see them in a positive way (high positive affectivity), hence employees would respond more constructively to stressful situations than employees with low positive affectivity.

Moreover, when employee was in a high-power customer-service position, the negative effect related to abusive supervision is reduced, this is due to the cognitively demanding position, which holds high esteem in the society. Employees in the high power position generally have more financial resources and hence face less threat from abusive supervisors comparing with low-powered position employees.

Abusive supervision is also expected to exert a negative influence on the creativity of employees in that it dampens the inherent motivations of the individuals towards certain jobs, which can make the employees initiate injury feelings, and become reluctant to change the status quo, propose creative ideas and advance optimal solutions.

Cascading effect
Frequent abusive supervision from a senior manager can produce cascading effect throughout the organizational hierachies, meaning the abuse is likely to trickle down from top level to the department level and team level due to the learning effect of leaders' behavior. As a result, team leaders, as the immediate followers of department managers, tend to conclude that abusive behavior to their subordinate is legitimate within the organization, and thus become inclined to emulate and engage in similar supervisory abuse unintentionally or subconsciously, which creates an abusive atmosphere. This will then dampen creativity of team members and hamper free information sharing with their superiors.

Problem drinking
Numbers of studies showed that there is a positive and significant association between abusive work relationship and problem drinking outcomes, where problem drinking is defined as “more than seven drinks per week or more than three drinks per occasion for women; and more than 14 drinks per week or more than four drinks per occasion for men” (Enoch & Goldman, 2002, p.443) Cosper mentioned that the problematic alcohol consumption on or off job could be considered as an indirect retaliation to the abuse within the workplace (as cited in Bamberger & Bacharach, 2006). Besides the negative impacts on individuals’ physical health, social and interpersonal relationship, and legal concerns, problem drinking also lead a negative impact on individuals’ occupational life and the order in the workplace. Gill mentioned that problem drinking could decrease the productivity of the individuals in the workplace and increase the proportion of absence in the workplace. The health problem that caused by problem drinking also increase the organizations’ health-care cost and economic cost. Organization might increase the turnover rate to overcome the risk leads by these unexpected cost.

There are two reasons for the relationship between abusive supervision and problematic alcohol consumption, where the first reason is based on the paradigm of resistance, which suggests that individuals who experienced high level abusive supervision and unfair treatment in the workplace are more likely to seek retribution Except directly retaliate the supervisor, Hodson mentioned that individuals who experienced unfair treatment are seeking ways to express their frustration and anger as well as express their expectation of change. Drinking is one of the ways to express these negative emotions and Marlatt and his colleagues also mentioned that people who are provoked to be angry and frustrated but don't have the opportunity to retaliate consume more alcohol than people who retaliate confederate directly. The second reason for this relationship is based on the paradigm of stress, which suggest that the psychological stress that leads from abusive supervision is related to the high level of alcohol consumption among the employees. Richman and her colleagues noted that individuals tend to consider the abuse in the workplace as an additional stress and alienation and consequently consume alcohol in a problematic way to cope with this kind of stress. Individuals’ personality has an effect on the relationship between the abuse in the workplace and problem drinking, under similar condition of abuse, individuals who experience abuse in the workplace with lower conscientiousness and agreeableness have higher proportion of problem drinking.

Workplace deviance
As one of the consequence of abusive supervision, workplace deviance is defined as the voluntary behaviors such as theft, computer fraud and absenteeism, which leads to a significant negative impact on the organization norms and violates the well-being of the employees and the company. Compare to the nonabused organization, the organization with abusive supervisors has low level of affective organizational commitment. The relationship between workplace deviance and abusive supervision seems like a vicious circle, in other words, when the supervisor manages the organization in an abused way, the supervisor will experience low organizational commitment which could lead to greater deviance and greater abusive supervision.

Abusive supervision could be when supervisors ridicule their employees, give them the silent treatment, remind them of past failure, fail to give proper credit, wrongfully assign blame or blow up in fits of temper. The regression model analysis from Mitchell and Ambrose indicated that abusive supervision is related to the direct retaliation to the organization which would lead to the deviance at the organization. When the supervisors fail to reach the minimal standard perception of abusive supervision of the subordinates, the victims of abusive supervision will feel angry but could not retaliate against the supervisors directly, then, they display aggression behaviors direct to the organization, which seems to be a convenient and innocent target. Because employees control many of the organization's resources, the retaliative behaviors could be stealing the organization’s resources and unwillingness to display benefit behaviors towards the organization, which could decrease the productivity of the organization.

Conversely, abusive supervision leads to an effect on subordinates’ perception of interactional justice, which results in a low quality relationship between the employees and the supervisors or a “negative social exchange”, and violates the organization norms. According to the study of Tepper and his colleagues, they mentioned that the effect of abusive supervision on the workplace deviance would be stronger when the individuals perceive their colleagues are displaying deviance behaviors to the organization and more approving of the workplace deviance. Abusive supervision leads to an impact on individuals’ perception of justice about the aggressive behaviors within the organization. They might ignore the abuse behaviors that towards the organization even approve the behaviors within the organization. This will mess up the organization and intensify the deviance in the workplace.

Employee retaliation
Abusive supervision could lead to retaliatory behavior and increase aggressive responses of the employee. The victims of abusive supervision tend to get irratated and feel humiliated, thus disregard the consequences of their actions and have hostile feelings towards the abusive supervisors. The escalation of these negative feelings is likely to give rise to subordinates’ inclinations to reciprocate their supervisors abusive acts badly by engaging in vengeful and destructive activities, which will in turn damage the supervisors’ and the organisations’ interests.

General Ideology
Measures can be taken to build a strong and positive ethical environment, which is critical to employee morales and productivity. This could help the employees deal with the ethical dilemmas within the workplace, and prevent the norms of the employee behavior being shifted by the abusive supervisors and work deviances. A well-implemented organizational ethics could regulate both the supervisor and the employees’ behavior, eliminate aggressive behaviors, and support employees to defend any supervisory abuse.

Self-control enhancement
Since most of the abusive supervision is caused because of the absence of sufficient self-control of their behaviors, a good resolution to this issue would be to encourage greater self-control on the supervisors by training them to be more aware of the long-term consequences of their actions. It would also be a reasonable solution for organizations to adjust their recruitment criteria to reflect more on self-control capacity assessment for supervisory positions. Apart from that, given that many supervisors are poorly motivated to exert control on their own, organisations should be advised to boost their motivations to self-control by making them aware of their subordinates’ feeling of abusive acts and the detrimental effects this could bring about to the supervisor-subordinate relationships in the long term. It is essential to build an organizational culture of fairness and enhance interpersonal skills for leaders of all levels to construct an abuse-free work environment. Adopting a stringent policy regarding abusive supervision and making this clear to all hierachical levels to prevent the occurance of abusive supervision.

Emotional regulation
The deviance can be limited by training employees and supervisors to be more psychologically resiliant and capable of dealing with various negative events that happened in the workplace. . Organizations should also provide trainings on emotion regulation to potential victims of abusive supervision, minimizing their negative emotions at work so as to reduce their likelihood of becoming targets of abuse. This can create substantial cost savings and build a more productive work force.

Tailoring feedbacks
Since the self-report of being abused by their supervisors are more likely to occur on individuals who are low in conscientiousness or emotional stability, managers are required to gain a better knowledge of their subordinates’ personalities and try to mitigate mental stress and work loads of these individuals so that these individuals can be discovered earlier and intervened before they suffer any severe consequences. Also, supervisors need to give feedbacks in a less offensive manner and provide guidance and supervisions to those vulnerable individuals in order to prevent their behaviors from causing abuse.

Confidential mentoring
Both supervisors and employees can benefit from training programs in ways to get an idea of what makes interpersonal misinterpretation of one’s behavior as supervisory mistreatment more likely to happen in certain situations, such as minority status and increasing work stresses. It is also viable for organizations to incorporate services that are confidential to related employees such as private counselling, mentoring and coaching, which can help to promote understandings and mutual trust.

Reporting System
Taking into account the report of abusive supervision for supervisors of all levels in the mechanism of performance management. Apart from official reporting channels, organizations can also establish mechanisms with confidential and anonymous reporters for observed supervisory abuse. When figuring out the sources of abuse, organization has to replace the supervisors involved in the abuses with someone who is more compassionate and thoughtful towards subordinates’ feelings and emotions.

Third-party reconciliation
In the cases of episodic abuse when perpetrator and victims still have to work together after the incident, a third party is needed to reconciliate the conflicts between two parties in order to create a shared understanding of their perceptions when the abuse was happening and potential harms that were caused to the victims. The newly-appointed supervisor has to be aware of the previous abuse and look after individual concerns in the future. Finally, senior authorities have to work towards building a more caring and abuse-free organization climate to restore the employees’ trust and productivity in the workplace.

Direct Maintenance communication
The use of direct maintenance communication can be an effective way to maintain relationships as well as reduce discomforts among victims of abusive supervision. Nonetheless, trusts are required for employees before directly confront mental stress i.e.approach coping, subordinates will speak out injustice when they believe that they can count on others as a protection of their own interests, and supervisors will treat this as a constructive feedback. Moreover, approach coping slows down the effects of chronic stressors as it gives stressful subordinates a chance to directly confront and control these threats, and manage these negative emotions more effectively. This is expected to reduce the psychological distress caused by abusive supervision.

Job mobility
Empirical research suggests abusive supervision is less stressful when employees have more control, or a belief that they can get clear of, avoid, or moderate the impact of the abusive behaviours from their supervisors - whether or not they actually have a chance to do so. Potential control, or belief, allows employees to set a higher limit for the level of discomfort that the abusive supervision brings about, thereby mitigating some of the distress. Hence, abusive supervision should be less stressful when individuals have more attractive employment opportunities and believe that they can escape from the source of their distress, namely their supervisors' abusive behaviour.

Organizational justice
Individuals who consider the supervisors’ behaviours as abusive are more likely to forego their jobs. For individuals who do not quit their jobs, abusive supervision is related to lower prescriptive and affective commitment, lower job and life satisfaction, and higher family-to-work conflict, continuance commitment, and mental stress. Organizational justice moderates most of these deleterious effects of abusive supervision.

According to the justice theory, employees' evaluation of fairness is based on understanding of distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice. Organizational justice plays a moderating role for all the effects of the abusive supervision. Specifically, interactional justice is associated with all the effects except continuance commitment and conflict between family and work; procedural justice is correlated with the job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and work-to-family conflict; and distributive justice is relevant to job or life satisfaction and psychological distress.

Job embeddedness
The relationship between abusive supervision and job frustration could be mitigated by job embeddedness, which could decrease the proportion of individuals displaying the deviant behaviors. Job embeddedness is based on understanding of employees and what around them, their perception of adapting to their environment, and what they would forfeit if they quit their jobs. To be specific, the relationship is weaker and negative for those employees who are higher in job embeddedness and stronger and positive for those employees who are lower in job embeddedness. That is, employees who are more embedded in their jobs are virtually less possible to be frustrated by their jobs or engage in deviant behaviours when they experience the abusive supervision from their supervisors.

Authoritarian management style
According to social exchange arguments, individuals who experienced abuse are more likely to retaliate mistreatment from their supervisors by engaging in workplace deviance. However, not all individuals retaliate or engage in deviant behaviours. Consistent with qualitative research, one reason why some individuals retaliate while others do not is their work environment.

Uncertainty management theory (UMT) argues that individuals react negatively when uncertainty combines with abusive supervision. When individuals encounter abusive supervision in an uncertain work environment, UMT suggests that individuals respond negatively against the organization to take control of their own situations, which is "harming the organization is as much as a goal as protecting the self".

Based on theory and research, authoritarians are people who have a strong desire to avert uncertainty. Similarly, organization’s management who is inclined to avoid uncertainty can create an authoritarian management style. Authoritarian management style is conceptualized as individuals’ understanding of their management’s actions and decisions which are strict, inflexible and rule-bound. As a result, this type of management style is predictable and creates low uncertainty.

Applying UMT, individuals’ perceptions of being abused will be moderated when they experience a management style which shows a high level of authoritarianism. Then, the retaliation effect engendered by abusive supervision can be weakened.