In this dissertation, I developed an integrated model of information influence on abusive supervision and examined the moderating role of prior abuse on the relationship between current abusive supervision and employees’ deviant behaviors. Invoking inclusion/ exclusion model, I first proposed that there are two types of information with different usages. While employees use included information to form a generalized representation to interpret current supervisory abuse, they use excluded information to form a comparison standard to evaluate current supervisory abuse. Next, I proposed two competing hypotheses regarding the moderating role of prior abuse on the relationship between current abusive supervision and employee’s deviance. On the one hand, when employees use prior abuse...[ Read more ]

In this dissertation, I developed an integrated model of information influence on abusive supervision and examined the moderating role of prior abuse on the relationship between current abusive supervision and employees’ deviant behaviors. Invoking inclusion/ exclusion model, I first proposed that there are two types of information with different usages. While employees use included information to form a generalized representation to interpret current supervisory abuse, they use excluded information to form a comparison standard to evaluate current supervisory abuse. Next, I proposed two competing hypotheses regarding the moderating role of prior abuse on the relationship between current abusive supervision and employee’s deviance. On the one hand, when employees use prior abuse as a generalized representation, high prior abuse exacerbates the positive current abusive supervision–deviance relationship because prior abuse increases employees’ attention and reciprocation tendency towards the current abuse. On the other hand, when employees use prior abuse as a comparison standard, high prior abuse mitigates the positive relationship between current abusive supervision and employees’ deviant behaviors because prior abuse increases employees’ tolerance towards abusive supervision. Moreover, based on the inclusion/ exclusion model, I suggested that the moderating effect of prior abuse is weaker when employees have higher relational certainty in supervisor because these employees can rely on other information to interpret and evaluate current abusive supervision.

To test the proposed model, I collected seven-wave bi-weekly survey data over three consecutive months from 128 employees. I analyzed the data using multi-level modeling with Mplus. The results provided support for the exacerbation, but not mitigation, the role of prior abuse. Specifically, prior abuse moderates the relationship between current abusive supervision and employee’s supervisor-directed and interpersonal deviance such that the positive relationships are stronger when prior abuse is high. Also, as hypothesized, the moderating effect of prior abuse is weaker when employees have higher relational certainty. This dissertation advances our understanding of how employees use information, such as prior abuse, to interpret, evaluate and react to abusive supervision. Research implications and future research directions are discussed.

Keywords: abusive supervision, prior abusive supervision, relational certainty, employee deviant behaviors, inclusion/ exclusion model