BUS603: Managing People

This study revealed a series of distinct effects, in particular for exploitative leadership and abusive supervision. As predicted, abusive supervision emerges as the strongest precursor to overall negative affect.

Both abusive supervision and exploitative leadership are associated with stronger feelings of displeasure (i.e., upset) compared to organization-directed destructive behaviors. Yet, with regard to the afraid dimension of the PANAS, an interesting difference was revealed, with lower scores for exploitative leadership relative to the abusive supervision condition. This suggests that abusive supervision is more strongly related to anxiety among followers, reflected in increased arousal and feelings of submissiveness. With regard to turnover, all three forms of negative leadership were related to high general turnover intention. While the level of calculative turnover intention was inconspicuous among the three conditions, abusive supervision tends to relate to higher immediate turnover reactions.

Overall, the results were only partly as expected. This may be because of the hypothetical nature of the scenarios. Therefore, in Study 2 we designed a field study to test the same hypotheses.