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Essay: Leading Class Discussion on Abusive leadership: Synthesis

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  • Subject area(s): Leadership essays
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  • Published: 19 December 2019*
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  • Words: 826 (approx)
  • Number of pages: 4 (approx)

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For the class discussion, we decided on a “real-world” example and an additional empirical study to build on the knowledge of the topic of abusive leadership – which is usually regarded as abusive supervision in literature.

The “real-world” example used was a YouTube video called the “boss from hell”. The video depicts a situation in which the boss (i.e. abusive leader) was responding to the new employee (i.e. subordinate) with unreasonable unfriendly remarks (i.e. displaying hostile verbal behaviours) due to the employee’s failure to provide the right type of sugar for the boss’s coffee. Some of the hostile responses include “You have no brain” and “What you think means nothing. What you feel means nothing. You are here for me”. Tepper (2000, p.178) defined abusive supervision as “subordinates’ perceptions of the extent to which supervisors engage in the sustained display of hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviors, excluding physical contact”. The main interaction depicted in the video fits in nicely with the definition of abusive supervision.

The co-worker who was not part of the main interaction was also shortly treated with hostile remarks upon the boss’s leave, for example, “Ha Rex! What a name. Belongs to a mutt. I mean if I can get dog boy here a job,”. Which was a good example of how the targets of abusive supervision is not necessarily a situation just between the direct supervisor and the main target of interest, but be affecting neighbouring co-workers who were just bystanders of the abusive supervision encounter (Tepper, Simon, & Park, 2017). Consistent with social comparison theory, the negative effects of abusive supervision on abused subordinates are also influenced by the way supervisors treat the focal subordinates’ co-workers; whereby the negative effects are strengthened when the target is singled out from their peers (Huo, Lam, & Chen, 2012).

Another contribution of the video is how the boss tried to justify his hostile verbal behaviour by saying that he is just trying to help him. This part of the video was found to be interesting based on the comments from the class after watching the video as well. Whereby a few students questioned whether that form of justification could be contributing to the sustainability of the abusive supervision behaviour, and its perceived acceptability by the subordinates. It could also be perceived as an example of abrasive supervision rather than abusive, which shows the fuzzy line between the distinctions of the two concepts that would have been interesting to discuss about (Tepper, Simon, & Park, 2017). In addition, the ending of the video showed how the target of the abusive supervision responded after the situation. Immediately after the interaction, he internalized it, blamed himself, and showed explicit frustration and disappointment towards himself. This was a good example of a consequence of abusive supervision on subordinates’ psychological well-being (Tepper, 2000).

For the additional empirical study, we decided on the Tepper, Moss, and Duffy (2011) paper that examined three potential predictors of abusive supervision – supervisor perceptions of deep-level dissimilarity, relationship conflict, and supervisor evaluations of subordinates’ performance. The study findings helped to provide some insight as to why some subordinates become targets of abusive supervision over others. The three factors investigated in their study showed significant results informing how abusive supervision could be predicted and therefore, be prevented if interventions incorporated those factors in its recommendations. This study was chosen as Tepper, Simon, and Park (2017) review of the abusive leadership literature included the critique of the lack of studied antecedents. Majority of the research is still on the consequences of abusive supervision, though informative, research on the antecedents would be useful in providing insights to inform practitioners’ work for interventions with the aim to eliminate the impact of supervisory abuse.

Another reason to why we wanted to provide another study predicting the occurrence of abusive supervision, is that from previous class discussion, there was significant interest in how we could prevent unwanted and/or unhealthy workplace situations from happening in the first place. Though learning about how to deal with the consequences are important, the ideal situation is to know how to prevent them. Therefore, it would have been useful to address another studied predictor besides the required reading that found the indirect effect of sleep quality via leader ego depletion on abusive supervision (Barnes, Lucianetti, Bhave, & Christian, 2015).

Therefore, the reason to why I thought the You tube video “boss from hell” would be a good “real-world” example, was that it covered a few different components of abusive supervision that should be brought to attention and consideration. And the Tepper, Moss, and Duffy (2011) empirical study helped to share another interesting predictor of abusive supervision apart from the supervisor’s quality of sleep and the general review of the antecedents covered in the Tepper, Simon, and Park (2017) paper. As compared to emphasizing the negative consequences of abusive leadership – which tends to be the dominant interest of study in research and practice –, we wanted to highlight the importance of predicting the undesirable behaviour.

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