An Attributional Analysis of Employees’ Responses to Abusive Supervision

Abstract

We invoke Fairness Theory (Folger & Cropanzano, 2001) to develop an attributional model of employees’ responses to abusive supervision. According to the model abused employees may attribute their supervisors’ hostile behavior to the supervisor (e.g., poor social skills, indifference to the effect their behavior may have on others) and/or the organization (e.g., pressure from higher organizational authorities). We theorize that abused employees experience less interactional justice (i.e., the perception that their supervisor has treated them fairly on an interpersonal basis) when they make stronger attributions to the supervisor, but this effect should be more pronounced when organizational attributions are lower. Interactional justice should, in turn, be negatively related to abused employees’ job satisfaction, and positively associated with employees’ job satisfaction, intentions to quit, anxiety, depression, and workplace deviance. A test of the framework using data collected from368 abused employees from three organizations provided support for our mediated-moderation hypotheses. We discuss the framework’s implications for abusive supervision theory and research.