Abusive supervision: subordinate personality or supervisor behavior?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether employees’ personalities are associated with their perceptions of abusive supervision. Design/methodology/approach – In total, 756 working adults provided data. Subjects’ began by taking personality assessments and then received a performance evaluation via a video role-play. Subjects then provided their perceptions of how abusive the supervisor was. The data were analyzed with regression analysis. Findings – The results illustrated that respondents’ hostile attribution styles, negative affectivity, trait anger, and entitlement were positively and significantly associated with perceptions of abusive supervision. Research limitations/implications – The results imply that judgments of supervisory abuse and interventions to ameliorate the negative consequences associated with abusive supervision should consider subordinates’ characteristics. Originality/value – This study controlled supervisor behavior via a video vignette to assess how multiple subordinates’ perceive the same supervisor behavior. This study contributes to a more complete understanding of how personality is associated with perceptions of abusive supervision.