It's Only Abusive If I Care: The Effect of Organizational Concern on Abusive Supervision, Stress, and Work Behaviors

Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory, we propose that abusive supervision increases stress responses in targets, which, in turn, diminishes their ability to perform extra- and in-role work behaviors. However, based on COR theory, we argue that followers who are driven by low rather than high organizational concern motives place less value on their work and the social context in which technical activities occur. As such, feeling low organizational concern should make people less susceptible to abusive supervision rather than more so. Thus, organizational concern was proposed to moderate the abuse-stress relationship. Across two multisource studies, we found support for most of our hypotheses. Abusive supervision negatively affected organizational citizenship behaviors via increased stress, and low organizational concern was found to attenuate the detrimental effects of abusive supervision. Implications for leadership literature and future research are discussed.