The interactive effect of abusive supervision and leaders’ prototypicality on coworkers’ ostracism

Despite several studies on coworkers’ reactions to abusive supervision of a coworker, little is known about whether and how leaders’ characteristics may influence these effects. Building on social information processing theory and the social identity model of organizational leadership, we purported that coworkers would ostracize abused employees, but this effect would critically depend on leaders’ in-group prototypicality. We further expected that abusive supervision and coworkers’ ostracism would result in lower creativity of the target employee. Results from a multi-wave survey involving three data sources support the proposed model. Specifically, abusive supervision was positively related to coworkers’ ostracism and to lower employee creativity. However, these effects only emerged for leaders who were high in in-group prototypicality. By contrast, leaders’ abusive supervision was unrelated to ostracism and lowered creativity for leaders with low in-group prototypicality. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.