Abusive Supervision Harms Supervisors

In Episode 34, we discuss a paper by Shen, Liang, Brown, Ni, & Zheng (2022) on how supervisors abuse poorly performing subordinates, but that this causes emotional exhaustion for the supervisors. Having a chronically poorly performing subordinate increases supervisors’ emotional exhaustion, due in part, to supervisors’ higher levels of abusive supervision. This further challenges the usefulness of the “tough love” approach to poor performance.