Crowns Too Heavy: How Top Managers’ Empowerment Leads to Middle Managers’ Abusive Supervision

A plethora of studies have shown the benefits of empowering leadership on organizational effectiveness, including positive implications to the person being empowered. As an extension, our study joins in this discussion by demonstrating and theorizing an unexpected effect of top managers’ empowering leadership upon middle managers’ abusive supervision toward frontline employees. Integrating the consent-based theory of power and a self-regulatory perspective, we propose that middle managers will perceive a strong performance pressure in facing top managers’ empowering leadership, which then activates their abusive supervision toward their own followers. Results from one scenario manipulation and a multilevel field study provided consistent support for our predictions and further showed that these effects were more pronounced when the middle manager supervised a team with performance deficiency. Implications of our study for the leadership research are discussed, accordingly.