How Do Authoritarian Leadership and Abusive Supervision Jointly Thwart Follower Proactivity? A Social Control Perspective
基于社会控制视角，研究了威权领导与辱虐管理如何通过增强员工的无权力感，共同抑制员工的主动性行为，并用三个中国样本验证了二者的替代效应。
A number of studies have examined how employees regulate their behaviors in keeping with their leaders’ formal control (e.g., authoritarian leadership) or informal control (e.g., abusive supervision). Yet, these two lines of investigation are largely unintegrated. Drawing on a social control perspective, we integrate these two forms of controlling behaviors into one coherent model and link them to employee proactive behaviors. We propose that authoritarian leadership and abusive supervision substitute effects from each other in thwarting followers’ proactivity by increasing their perceived powerlessness. We then test our hypotheses with three field samples of Chinese supervisor-subordinate dyads, using different exemplary behaviors to operationalize proactivity (i.e., taking charge, personal initiative, and proactive performance). The findings across the three studies show that authoritarian leadership and abusive supervision weaken each other’s effects in terms of inhibiting subordinate proactive behaviors. Moreover, in our third study, perceived powerlessness mediates this interaction effect. These results, however, do not generalize to employee affiliative behaviors, operationalized as altruism, cooperation, and conscientious behaviors. The implications of our findings for theory and practice are discussed.