Abuse for status: A social dominance perspective of abusive supervision.

Abusive supervision in the workplace is an important issue because it is detrimental to organizations and their performance. However, little is known about antecedents of supervisors' abusive behavior. To better understand the antecedents of abusive supervision, we develop a model that illustrates why, how and when supervisors display sustained abusive behavior toward their subordinates. Focusing on status, we propose that a motivation for status enhancement mediates the relationship between supervisors' status-related dispositional traits (their social dominance orientation) and their abusive behavior. We also propose that this mediated relationship is stronger when supervisors experience positional instability, when they perceive low internal respect, and when their organizations have a mechanistic structure or a hostile climate. Overall, our conceptual model sheds new light on the proactive motivation for abusive supervision.