Abusive supervision and destructive forms of leadership at work

Thomas Fischer

Chapter 6 in Handbook of Counterproductive Work Behavior, 2025, pp 91-103 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: I review research on abusive supervision and destructive leadership and offer an overview of important definitions, measurement tools, and current research evidence. I also shed critical light on the conceptual and methodological foundations of abusive supervision and destructive leadership research. Both the abusive supervision and destructive leadership construct conflate actual leader behaviors with followers’ subjective evaluations. I show that this problem extends to non-leadership constructs such as counterproductive workplace behaviors too. Moreover, I show how conceptual conflation manifests in conflated measurement. Methodological rigor is further limited by undue extrapolations of research findings from settings of low base rates of abusive supervision to settings of high base rates. I conclude by assessing the value of the existing knowledge base and by offering recommendations for studying the dark side of leadership and organizational behavior more productively. Overall, I aim to contribute to a fundamental rethink of this important field of research.

Keywords: Abusive supervision; Destructive leadership; Conceptual conflation; Conflated measurement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035306664
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