WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOUR SUPERVISOR RIDICULED YOU IN FRONT OF YOUR COLLEAGUES? MOST RESEARCH SUGGESTS EMPLOYEES WOULD BLAME THEIR SUPERVISOR FOR MISTREATING THEM, BECOME ANGRY AND SEEK RETRIBUTION. HOWEVER, IF MOST EMPLOYEES RESPONDED THIS WAY, WHY DO JUST 13 PERCENT OF WORKERS IN THE US REPORT WHEN THEY HAVE EXPERIENCED ABUSIVE SUPERVISION?

A possible answer to this question may be that employees sometimes help their supervisors when they become the target of hostile verbal or non-verbal behaviours. This can be best described as people’s guilt – when employees feel that they have an otherwise good relationship with their supervisor, but then become the target of abusive supervision – they wonder why this happened and potentially look for cause within themselves. Consequently, they will feel guilt and be motivated to rectify the situation, by helping the supervisor more and not less.

A controlled online experiment and a two-week daily diary study supported this explanation. In the experiment with 200 respondents, half of the participants were presented with a scenario in which they had an overall good relationship with their supervisor and told the other half that they had a normal relationship. We then randomly split these two halves again into two more halves and said to the first group that their supervisor acted in a hostile manner by, for example, ignoring them and putting them down in front of others. The other group read a scenario which depicted how the supervisor usually acted. We then asked them what they would think and whether they would wonder if they had done something wrong that might have hurt their relationship, if they would feel guilty and if they would be willing to help their supervisor. The results show that self-blame and guilt were highest when the supervisor was described as abusive in an otherwise good relationship. This guilt was related to a higher willingness to be helpful.

We wanted to see if these results could be replicated in a workplace setting and administered two daily surveys over two weeks. Data from 275 working adults in the US confirmed the previous findings. On days when people reported incidents of abusive supervision, they felt more guilt. Subsequently, they helped their supervisors more the same day, but only if they thought that, by and large, they otherwise had an overall good relationship. These findings beg the question of why most prior research has shown that employees will retaliate? It’s important to note that abusive management by no means should be considered an effective leadership behaviour to drive performance. On the contrary, abusive supervision is morally wrong, creates stress and tension amongst employees who experience or observe it and leads to performance losses. Therefore, it should be in everyone’s interest to prevent any incidents of abusive supervision.

Yet, our nuanced picture holds some critical managerial implications. First, for managers – simply because they see their employees behaving cooperatively – does not mean that they are great leaders. We don’t think that most supervisors intentionally seek to be abusive, but, as our results show, just looking at their employees’ behaviours does not provide good feedback. Instead, leaders should try to understand their leadership, by explicitly asking for feedback and pulsing their employees on actual leadership behaviours. Concurrently, employees must define a red line that supervisors must not cross. If they do, employees need to speak directly to their supervisor or higher-level authorities in their company.

FOR FURTHER INFO WWW.THE-KLU.ORG

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