BUS603: Managing People

In line with the results found in Study 1, both abusive supervision and exploitative leadership were found to have a negative relationship with positive affect. With regard to negative affect, however, different patterns were found. Abusive supervision was related most strongly to overall negative affect and to the afraid sub-dimension of negative affect. Also, it was more strongly related to the upset sub-dimension, relative to exploitative leader behavior. This is different from what we found in Study 1, where exploitative leadership had an equally strong effect on the upset sub-dimension. Overall, the pattern found in Study 2 supports the notion that abusive supervision is both generally and relative to exploitative leadership more strongly related to negative emotional reactions of followers. Organization-directed destructive leader behavior seems to play a marginal role when it comes to followers' emotional reactions. A potential explanation for this could be that followers perceive such leader behaviors as rather distal – i.e., as actions they can more efficiently distance themselves from.

For turnover intentions, the results are more complex. While all three types of destructive leadership behavior relate to general turnover intention, when examining the relative weights, exploitative leadership has the strongest relationship. However, exploitative leadership had the strongest positive relationship with calculative turnover intention – i.e., followers would stay until the next milestone in their career was reached before leaving – whereas abusive supervision had limited impact. This is in line with our hypothesis: because of the stronger self-worth threat, followers would be less likely to have a calculative approach.

However, when looking at immediate turnover intention, a low effect was found for abusive supervision. Whereas this may seem counterintuitive at first, the underlying explanation may be that the decision to leave a job depends on many factors that are situational, and may depend on the individual follower's personality.