臺大管理論叢第31卷第3期

53 NTU Management Review Vol. 31 No. 3 Dec. 2021 employees’ emotional reactions, which in turn have an influence on employees’ attitudes and behaviors (Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996). Leaders’ abusive supervision—the display of hostile behaviors in work settings—often amounts to highly stressful events that employees cannot easily elude (Avey, Wu, and Holley, 2015; Brief and Weiss, 2002). Tepper (2000) defines 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 manifestations of abusive supervision include criticizing publicly, intimidating by use of threats, using disparaging language, withholding important information, giving the silent treatment, making aggressive eye contact, yelling or screaming at subordinates, and ridiculing subordinates in front of others (Aryee, Sun, Chen, and Debrah, 2008; Lin, Wang, and Chen, 2013; Tepper, 2000; Zellars, Tepper, and Duffy, 2002). NIFTs reflect leaders’ negative assumptions and attitudes. Drawing on the principle of attitude-behavior consistency (Haddock and Maio, 2004), we predict that leaders would direct negative behaviors (e.g., abusive supervisory behaviors) toward employees, in conformity with the leaders’ negative attitudes (e.g., NIFTs) toward the employees. Although no previous study has directly proposed and examined the relationship between leaders’ NIFTs and the leaders’ abusive supervisory behaviors, Tepper, Moss, and Duffy (2011) have found that leaders’ negative perceptions of employees are related to abusive supervision. Tepper et al. (2011) contends that leaders do not apply the same moral considerations to all employees. In circumstances where leaders dislike an employee or perceive themselves as distinct from an employee, they may exclude this employee from their scope of justice (Tepper et al., 2011), and feel that this employee is “expendable, undeserving, exploitable, and irrelevant” (Opotow and Weiss, 2000). Consciously or unconsciously, leaders may adopt hostile acts against such an employee (Tepper et al., 2011). According to AET, negative events in work settings have environmental cues or underlying reasons (Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996). Employees who often experience abusive supervisory behaviors (i.e., negative events) search for cues and reasons to justify, or at least to understand, the reoccurrence of the behaviors. If no obvious cues or reasons present themselves, an explanation that employees would likely consider is that the abusive leaders are implicitly biased against the targets of the abuse (Sy, 2010; Weick, 1995). We thus propose the following hypothesis.

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