The jerk whisperers: The interactive effects of abusive supervision, self-control, and supervisor performance on subordinate-supervisor social exchange quality

The prevailing wisdom in social exchange research advocates that abusive supervision universally impairs subordinates' perceptions of social exchange relationship quality with their supervisors. We challenge this notion by drawing from social exchange and self-control theories to hypothesize that the negative relationship between perceptions of abusive supervision and social exchange relationship quality between subordinates and supervisors is stronger for subordinates who possess lower levels of self-control and perceive lower levels of supervisors' performance than others. We test the hypothesized three-way interaction with data collected from 116 employee-acquaintance dyads across two time periods. The results of hierarchical moderated multiple regression analyses demonstrate support for the hypothesized model. This study makes theoretical and empirical contributions by integrating social exchange and self-control theories in a novel way that directly measures the theoretical foundations in our study so we can incrementally improve our understanding of how perceptions of abusive supervision, subordinates' self-control, and subordinates' perceptions of supervisors' performance interactively affect the quality of subordinate-supervisor social exchange relationships. Ultimately, our findings have important implications for helping researchers and practitioners understand the nuances of subordinate-supervisor relationships in the context of abusive supervision perceptions, Interpersonal Relationship at Work.