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Following the abusive leader? When and how abusive supervision influences victim’s creativity through observers

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Abstract

Despite several studies exploring the effect of abusive supervision on employee creativity from various perspectives, the social side of creativity remains largely unexplored. Building on the social identity model of organizational leadership and the dynamic componential theory of creativity, we purported that abusive supervision would dampen victims’ creativity through coworkers’ ostracism, but this effect would critically depend on leaders’ in-group prototypicality. Results from a multi-wave and multi-source survey and a scenario experiment provided converging support to the proposed model. Specifically, we found that abusive supervisor was negatively related to employee creativity via coworkers’ ostracism only among leaders high (vs. low) in-group prototypicality. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

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Acknowledgements

We thank senior editor Rico Lam and two reviewers for highly constructive comments. The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [72272094, 71872109, 72271550], Program for Innovative Research Team of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (2020110927), Program for Innovative Research Team of College of Business of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.

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  1. Department of Human Resource Management, Shanghai University of Finance & Economics, 777 Guoding Rd, Shanghai, 200433, People’s Republic of China

    Yahua Cai, Fufu Sun & Jingsong Li

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Cai, Y., Sun, F. & Li, J. Following the abusive leader? When and how abusive supervision influences victim’s creativity through observers. Asia Pac J Manag (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-022-09869-y

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