The Effect Of Abusive Supervision On Subordinates’ Task Performance

Abusive supervision is a common phenomenon in the workplace. Relevant researches mainly focus on the negative effects of the abusive supervision on the subordinate’s psychology, attitude and behavior. The effects of abusive supervision on subordinates’ behaviors include performance. However, does this effect of abusive supervision on task performance vary from people to people, vary from time to time, and vary from place to place? Those influence factors mainly have two aspects:the work environment (such as:job mobility, work atmosphere) and subordinate’s traits (such as:positive emotions, tradition). The motivation is the internal driving force in the individual behaviors and can influence individual’s response to the abusive supervision, which can affect performance. Then, are this effect same to the different motivation subordinate? If there are differences, then which kind of motivation of employee does survive the slightly negative effect? Which kind of motivation of employee does survive the seriously negative effect? That is, which kind of motivation of employee can alleviate this negative effect? Which kind of motivation of employee can strengthen this negative effect?Based on above questions, we reviewed the previous researches on the negative effects of abusive supervision and relevant moderators. Considering the fact that the most important reason of abusive supervision is that most leaders want to motivate their subordinates’ performance, so this paper adopted the task performance as the dependent variable of abusive supervision to establish the main effect. In motivation theory, the self-enhancement motive and goal orientation involve that other people response to their impression and ability assessment. What’s more, abusive supervision represents the assessments of leaders to their impressions and abilities. Therefore, we adopt these two closely related to abusive supervision variables as moderating variables of the main effect. Based on affective events theory (AET), this paper argued that abusive supervision could reduce their subordinates’ performance and self-enhancement motive and goal orientation could influence this process. Avoid (performance) goal orientation could aggravate this negative effect. In contrast, self-enhancement motive, learning goal orientation and prove (performance) goal orientation could alleviate this negative effect. Through the analysis of 202 employees in the 10 manufacturing companies of Shanxi we found:Self-enhancement motive, learning goal orientation and prove (performance) goal orientation could moderate the relationship of abuse supervision and task performance and alleviate the negative effects of the abusive supervision on the task performance when these motives were at a higher level.Considering the motivation variables of abusive supervision have been still blank, therefore this paper improved the abusive supervision studies and provided a new idea about the negative leadership researches. That is, self-enhancement motive and goal orientation may moderate other negative leadership. More importantly, this study can provide the leaders of abusive supervision some inspirations to seek advantages and avoid disadvantages.