Voice as a Function of Attribution of Abusive Supervision: Investigating the Role of Personality

Abusive supervision undermines subordinate’s extra role behaviors such as voice. However, certain subordinates see positive motives in their supervisor’s abusive behaviors. Taking insights from the attribution-based theory of workplace harassment, I suggest that subordinates attribute leader’s abusive supervision to three motives: injury initiation, leader-centric performance promotion and follower-centric performance promotion. I contend that the more the follower attributes their leader’s abusive behavior to injury initiation and leader-centric performance promotion motives, the more likely they are to engage in defensive voice and less constructive voice. Contrarily, I posit that the more the follower attributes their leader’s abusive behavior to follower-centric performance promotion motive, the more likely they are to engage in constructive voice and less defensive voice. I also contend that subordinate’s trait agreeableness and neuroticism are key moderators that influence subordinate’s attributions of motives following abusive supervision. Pilot Study 1 employs a one-time, single-source design to test the psychometric properties of the focal measures, construct validity of the follower-centric and leader-centric performance promotion motives and correlations among the focal variables. Pilot Study 2 employs doctoral students as expert raters to validate the abusive supervision measure to identify items that are unambiguous, observable and capture active abusive supervision. Finally, the Main Study employs a multi-source, time separated design to test mediation and moderated-mediation hypotheses via structural equation modeling and reliability-corrected single-indicator latent structural equation modeling. Further, the theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.