Breaking Bad: Abusive Supervision of High Integrity Leaders

It is well known that abusive supervision hurts employees’ self-evaluation, making them feel worthless and excluded. Conventional wisdom suggests that “bad leaders” abuse employees, however, increasingly we know that “good leaders” may at times lose control and abuse employees. Does employees’ self-evaluation suffer more or less when abusive supervision comes from the hands of a high integrity leader? Since people may rationalize away abusive behavior on the part of a perceived “good leader”, we often overlook and pay scant attention to the damage of abusive supervision that they cause on employees. To explore this issue, we draw on attribution theory to theorize, counter-intuitively, that abusive supervision from a leader high on behavioral integrity exacerbates employees’ damaged self-evaluation, as leader behavioral integrity may compel abused employees to make internal rather than external attributions of abusive acts, subsequently influencing their self-evaluation and task performance. Taking a mixed-method approach, results based on an experimental scenario study (Study 1: N = 198) and a multi-wave multi-source field study (Study 2: N = 269 employees, N = 48 supervisors) support our propositions. This work points to the exacerbating effect on employees when good leaders break bad.