Abusive Supervision and Subordinate Self-Control: Implications for Social Exchange

We draw from social exchange and self-control theories to hypothesize that subordinates’ perceptions of abusive supervision are negatively associated with social exchange relationship quality with their supervisors. In particular, we argue that the negative relationship between perceptions of abusive supervision and social exchange relationship quality between subordinates and supervisors is stronger for subordinates who possess lower levels of self- control and perceive lower levels of supervisor performance than others. We tested the hypothesized three-way interaction with data collected from 116 employee-acquaintance dyads attained through a snowball data collection method across two time periods. The results of hierarchical moderated multiple regression analyses demonstrated support for the hypothesized model. This study makes a theoretical contribution by integrating social exchange and self-control theories in a novel way that incrementally improves our understanding of how perceptions of abusive supervision, subordinates’ self-control, and subordinates’ perceptions of supervisors’ performance interactively affect the quality of subordinate-supervisor social exchange relationships. Also, this study makes an empirical contribution to abusive supervision research by directly empirically measuring perceived social exchange relationship quality between subordinates and supervisors in the context of abusive supervision perceptions.