Abstract

Although the negative consequences of abusive supervision have been recognized in the literature, some organizational leaders are still able to display abusive behaviors without harming their followers’ perceived leader effectiveness. Moreover, the empirical findings indicate that the relationship between abusive supervision and followers’ perceived leader effectiveness is mixed. Based on the perspective of “abusive supervision as political activity”, we propose an integrative model to investigate whether the leaders’ political skills and physical attractiveness moderate the relationship between abusive supervision and follower’ perceived leader effectiveness, which in turn influences supervisor-directed citizenship behaviors.
To test the proposed hypotheses, we collect data from 113 leaders and 367 followers at two different time points, resulting in 367 valid paired responses. The results of multilevel path-analysis show that abusive supervision has a negative indirect effect on followers’ supervisor-directed citizenship behaviors via reduced perceived leader effectiveness. However, when leaders are high in physical attractiveness, the negative indirect effect becomes positive. Moreover, when leaders are high in political skills, this negative indirect effect is further strengthened. We also control for follower negative emotions and Leader-member Exchange (LMX) to rule out alternative explanations.  

Keywords

abusive supervisionperceived leadership effectivenesspolitical skillsphysical attractivenesssupervisor-directed citizenship behaviors