Examination of daily abusive supervision effects on next-day employee wellbeing: a spillover perspective

ABSTRACT

Objective

Most previous studies on abusive supervision (AS) and employee wellbeing have used cross-sectional designs and explored long-term effects. However, AS has been reported to vary on a daily basis and this variance exceeds inter-person variance. Therefore, the current study examined the short-term (within 1 day) effects of leaders’ daily AS on employee sleep and wellbeing. Based on the spillover effect theory, we posited that daily AS is a negative experience that can lead to insomnia, thereby affecting next-day wellbeing. In addition, we hypothesized that these effects could be moderated by individuals’ tendencies to engage in rumination (low or high).

Method

A daily diary design was used to examine the relationship between daily AS and next-day wellbeing. Our analysis of data from 128 full-time employees across 10 consecutive working days using multi-level model.

Results

Our results showed that insomnia mediated the relationship between daily AS and next-day employee wellbeing, and further showed that this relationship was moderated by rumination.

Conclusions

These data demonstrate a spillover effect from AS at work to quality of sleep at home, and that use of rumination as a coping strategy can exacerbate the effects of AS on insomnia and next-day employee wellbeing.

Key Points

What is already known about this topic:

1. AS, as a negative leadership style, exerts detrimental effects on employees’ well-being.

2. AS has a spillover effect that extends its negative effects into employees’ home-domain.

3. Rumination, as a maladaptive coping mechanism, exacerbates the deleterious effects of negative stressors on psychological well-being.

What this topic adds:

1. In contrast to the conventional perspective that AS is a form of leadership, we conceptualise it as a type of negative daily behaviour and investigate its spillover effect on employees’ wellbeing the following day.

2. Through the experience sampling method, we can not only identify the directional relationship between AS and employees’ well-being but also capture the temporal spillover effects of AS.

3. We further investigated the internal mechanisms and boundary conditions of daily AS on employee well-being, revealing that rumination exacerbates the spillover effects of such behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Daily abusive supervision
• insomnia
• daily wellbeing
• rumination

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.