Abusive Supervision & Workplace Deviance

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Introduction Due to an interest in the negative side of leadership and the negative behaviour of employees we wanted to find out more about the relationship between abusive supervision and interpersonal deviance and how interactional justice mediates this relationship. We also wanted to also see how power distance moderates the relationships. (See model in Appendix 1) Abusive supervision is described as “subordinates’ perceptions of the extent to which their supervisors engage in the sustained display of hostile verbal and non-verbal behaviors, excluding physical contact”. Behavior related to abusive supervision is the use of derogatory names, screaming yelling and humiliation in front of others. Deviant behavior is describes as behavior that violates organizational norms. Mediator By researching earlier studies measuring the relationship we found as expected that abusive supervision is positively related to deviant behaviour with r=0.36. These founding are supporting the theory of social learning which suggests that people learns from a social context. If a supervisor is behaving in an inappropriate way the employee will believe that this behaviour is acceptable and use the behaviour himself. Knowing that the relationship was strong, r=0.36, we wanted to investigate further what was causing the relationship. We found out that a common mediator to the relationship was interactional justice and decided to include it into our research. Interactional injustice is an individual’s perceptions of the degree to which organizational representatives treat them with respect, honesty, propriety, and sensitivity to their personal needs. The relationship between abusive supervision and interactional injustice is created when an employee perceive a lack of fairness due to an abusive behaviour from a leader. The relationship between abusive supervision and interactional

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