Recently, Ju Dong, a young teacher from BNU Business School published her paper, which is entitled as “Supervisory Consequences of Abusive Supervision: An Investigation of Sense of Power, Managerial Self-efficacy, and Task-oriented Leadership Behavior”, in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (OBHDP), the prestigious journal for management and applied psychology. The journal is one of the 50 journals used by the Financial Times referencing for the World’s Business School Ranking, and is also listed on the ABS 4 Star Journal list.  This is another article Ju came out with on abusive supervision, trying to continue exposing how abusive supervision impacts supervisors themselves.

Here is the abstract:

While a large number of studies have shown the detrimental effects of abusive supervision on subordinates’work attitudes and outcomes, little is known about how abusive supervision impacts supervisors themselves. Drawing upon self-perception theory and power-dependence theory, we take a unique actor-focused approach to examine how and when engaging in abusive supervisory behavior may benefit actors (i.e., supervisors). Specifically, we propose that abusive supervisory behavior is positively related to supervisors’ state sense of power, which in turn positively relates to their managerial self-efficacy and task-oriented leadership behavior. Furthermore, the relationship between abusive supervisory behavior and state sense of power and the positive indirect effect of abusive supervisory behavior on managerial self-efficacy via state sense of power are stronger for supervisors with low, rather than high, levels of chronic sense of power. Our hypotheses are substantially supported by a multi-wave field diary study (Study 1) conducted across 10 consecutive workdays and three experiments (Studies 2a, 2b, and 3). Moreover, supplementary analyses showed that abusive supervisory behavior was positively related to sense of power and managerial self-efficacy only in the short term (i.e., these relationships turned negative after one week). Our findings contribute to the abusive supervision literature by delineating a nuanced view of the supervisory outcomes of abusive supervision.