Summary

۱ INTRODUCTION

۲ THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESES

۳ STUDY 1

۴ STUDY 2

۵ GENERAL DISCUSSION

۶ CONCLUSION

REFERENCES

Summary

To understand the relationship between employee performance and abusive reactions from supervisors, we examine the role of supervisors’ attributions about employees’ performance. Drawing on the fundamental attribution error, we argue that supervisors over-attribute lower levels of performance to employees’ internal factors (i.e., conscientiousness), which then triggers higher levels of abusive supervision. In Study 1, we collected data from 189 supervisor–employee dyads. The results indicated that lower levels of supervisor-rated employee performance related to supervisor biased attributions to employee conscientiousness, which in turn resulted in employee-rated abusive supervision. In Study 2, we combined a recall task with a vignette design to replicate and extend our findings. We demonstrated that after adjusting for the baseline level of employee conscientiousness, supervisors overattributed poor performance to employee conscientiousness and then engaged in higher levels of abusive behaviors. Further, consistent with premises of fundamental attribution error, we found that in the absence of information about who was at fault for poor performance, supervisors over-attributed poor performance to internal factors (employee) as compared to external factors (software malfunction). Taken together, our findings demonstrate that biased attributions about employee conscientiousness help explain the relationship between employee performance and abusive supervision.

۱ | INTRODUCTION

Abusive supervision represents a range of negative behaviors directed at employees (Tepper, 2002). Not surprisingly, previous research has demonstrated an array of adverse consequences related to abusive behaviors from supervisors, including reduced employee well-being, lower job satisfaction, higher levels of work–family conflict, increased depression, and higher levels of emotional exhaustion (Hershcovis & Barling, 2010; Mackey et al., 2017). Recognizing that even a low-base phenomenon can significantly damage employee and organizational outcomes, research on abusive supervision has exploded in recent years (see Tepper et al., 2017). Notwithstanding recent advancements in this area of research, we have much to learn about the mechanisms that help explain abusive behaviors (see Zhang & Bednall, 2016).

In this paper, we consider a cognitive mechanism for explaining abusive supervisory reactions: We posit that supervisors may engage in abusive behaviors based on potentially biased attributions of observed behaviors (employee performance) to employee personality (employee conscientiousness). More specifically, we explore whether supervisors over-attribute performance issues to employee lower conscientiousness yielding higher levels of abusive supervision.1 We theorize that it is not necessarily actual employees’ conscientiousness, but rather how supervisors make sense of employees’ behaviors that explains higher levels of abusive supervision. Drawing on the fundamental attribution error (FAE, Ross, 1977), we theorize that supervisors, like all of us, are prone to make biased attributions of observed behaviors to internal factors. These attributions, in turn, can give rise to negative behaviors such as abusive supervision directed at the employee. Thus, we demonstrate that supervisors may engage in higher levels of harming their employees as a result of unconscious perceptual biases.