How team helping influences abusive and empowering leadership: The roles of team affective tone and performance

• Author: Donald H. Kluemper,Jenny M. Hoobler,Jarvis Smallfield
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2450
• Published date: 01 October 2020
• Date: 01 October 2020

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

How team helping influences abusive and empowering

leadership: The roles of team affective tone and performance

Jarvis Smallfield

1

| Jenny M. Hoobler

2

| Donald H. Kluemper

3

1

National Center for Professional & Research

Ethics, University of Illinois at Urbana-

Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, U.S.A.

2

Department of Human Resource

Management, University of Pretoria, Pretoria,

South Africa

3

Department of Managerial Studies, University

of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

Correspondence

Jarvis Smallfield, National Center for

Professional & Research Ethics, University of

Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 325 Coordinated

Science Lab, 1308 W. Main Street, Urbana IL

61801, U.S.A.

Email: jsmall4@illinois.edu

Summary

Leaders' perceptions of their teams are critical sources of contextual social

information influencing leadership behaviors. In this paper, we extend affect-as-

social-information theory to understand how and why team helping behaviors predict

leaders' mistreatment of their teams in the form of abusive supervision and positive

leader behavior in the form of empowering leadership, both through leaders'

perceptions of team positive affective tone. In addition, based on social information

processing, we examine the cue of leaders' perceptions of team task performance as

a factor that helps us understand when the relationship between positive affective

tone and leadership behaviors may be attenuated. In two text-based scenario

studies, a video-based scenario study, and a multisource field study, we found

evidence that team helping behavior is antecedent to abusive and empowering

leadership behaviors and that this relationship is fully mediated by leaders'

perceptions of team positive affective tone. Moreover, our results support team task

performance as a factor that decreases the degree to which affective tone is related

to abusive supervision. We discuss our findings as a caution to scholars' assumptions

about the directionality of leader-team influence, emphasizing the need to acknowl-

edge upward effects in workplace mistreatment research in the leader–team

relationship.

KEYWORDS

abusive supervision, affect, helping behavior, social information, teams

1|INTRODUCTION

Mistreatment of employees in the workplace is a pervasive

problem with significant consequences for both employees and their

organizations (Tepper, Henle, Lambert, Giacalone, & Duffy, 2008).

This behavior is particularly problematic when it originates from

leaders: Organizational behavior scholars have for about 20 years

used the construct abusive supervision (Tepper, 2000) to examine

the display of sustained, hostile verbal and nonverbal leader

behaviors over time. Growing evidence has shed light on the many

follower consequences of abusive supervision (Mawritz, Mayer,

Hoobler, Wayne, & Marinova, 2012; Schyns & Schilling, 2013)

including unfavorable team outcomes (Farh & Chen, 2014),

negative employee attitudes and behaviors (Avey, Wu, &

Holley, 2014; M. S. Mitchell & Ambrose, 2012), and poor

performance (Aryee, Chen, Sun, & Debrah, 2007; Xu, Huang, Lam, &

Miao, 2012). Although much research attention has been

devoted to the outcomes of abusive supervision, less has focused

on why it occurs (Tepper, 2007), potentially helping scholars and

practitioners alike to understand, detect, and even prevent its

occurrence.

In this series of studies, we examine one reason how and why

abusive supervision emerges, offering a new, team-centric explana-

tion. Downward influence is often the assumed direction of power

relationships in organizations, where leaders' behavior is viewed as

the catalyst for followers' and teams' attitudes and behaviors

Received: 28 September 2018 Revised: 24 April 2020 Accepted: 27 April 2020

DOI: 10.1002/job.2450

J Organ Behav. 2020;41:757–781. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 757

(Day, 2012; Lee, Willis, & Tian, 2018; Martinko, Harvey, Brees, &

Mackey, 2013). But research has examined reciprocal behaviors

(Kluemper et al., 2018; Lian, Ferris, Morrison, & Brown, 2014) and

other patterns of relationships between individual employees and

leaders, including employee factors as antecedent to leader mistreat-

ment. Although teams are an important part of leaders' environments

critical to leader success (Decoster, Stouten, Camps, & Tripp, 2014;

Dierdorff, Bell, & Belohlav, 2011; Hu & Liden, 2011; Zaccaro,

Rittman, & Marks, 2001), little if any research attention has been paid

to the predictive influence team processes and the resulting emergent

states (Marks, Mathieu, & Stephen, 2001) have on leaders' behaviors

(Wang, Harms, & Mackey, 2014). In this way, we test the influence of

the team the leader supervises as an upward explanation for abusive

supervision. Alongside abusive supervision, we focus on teams' influ-

ence on leaders' positive, empowering leadership behavior.

Empowering leadership is where a leader promotes autonomous deci-

sion making, delegates authority, shares information, and asks fol-

lowers for input (Kirkman & Rosen, 1999). It results in significant

positive outcomes at both the team and individual levels including

task performance, citizenship behaviors, and creativity (Lee

et al., 2018).

Our model examining team antecedents to negative and

positive leadership behavior specifically predicts that the behavior

of teams acts as a cue for leaders about the teams' affective tone

which, in turn, provides leaders with information concerning their

teams that influences the leaders' behaviors. Affective tone is

defined as the interactions of group members which generate mood

at the group level (Burke, Brief, George, Roberson, &

Webster, 1989). In evaluating the influence of affective tone, we

utilize emotions as social information theory (Van Kleef, van den

Berg, & Heerdink, 2015) which explains how the emotional expres-

sions of others serve as social information influencing observers'

behavior. Leaders' social environments provide contextual cues

(e.g., the observations of team members' interactions) which are

used to interpret and make sense of events and people, infer affect,

and influence behaviors (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978; Van Kleef, 2009).

We test how the influence of team helping behavior on leaders'

perceptions of team positive affective tone is associated with abu-

sive and empowering leadership, respectively (Figure 1). Teams

viewed as lower in positive affective tone (Zhang & Bednall, 2015)

indicate to leaders the team is interacting poorly and members are

unlikely to support one another (Tepper, Duffy, Henle, &

Lambert, 2006). Applying a perpetrator predation framework

(Cortina, 2017; Cortina, Rabelo, & Holland, 2018) to the team level,

lower positive affective tone predicts mistreatment of the team in

the form of abusive supervision (Tepper, 2000). On the other hand,

higher levels of positive affective tone indicate to the leader that

team members are experiencing positive and supportive interactions,

which should provide an environment for empowering leadership

(Conger, 1989). Finally, our model considers how an additional type

of contextual information about the team, leaders' assessment of

team task performance (Rotundo & Sackett, 2002), interacts with

perceptions of affective tone to influence the effect of team helping

on leader behaviors. We expect that leaders' evaluations of high

team task performance will moderate perceptions of team positive

affective tone in such a way that higher levels of team task perfor-

mance will reduce the impact that positive affective tone has on

both abusive supervision (Mawritz et al., 2012) and empowering

leadership (T. B. Harris, Li, Boswell, Zhang, & Xie, 2014). Leaders

will use this observable cue, that is high performance, in combina-

tion with the affective cue (team positive affective tone) in deter-

mining how to act towards the team.

We test our model in four studies. First, we evaluate the effect

of team helping behavior on leader perceptions of team positive

affective tone in a text-based experimental scenario study. Second,

also in a text-based experimental scenario study, we test the effect

of positive affective tone on empowering leadership intentions.

Third, in a video-based experimental scenario study, we test the full

moderated mediated model. This includes helping, affective tone,

and the outcomes of abusive and empowering leadership, as well as

the moderating effect of high and low team performance at the sec-

ond stage of the mediation. Finally, we again test the full moderated

mediation model in a field study of 75 teams across five

organizations.

The set of studies presented here answers the recent call from

teamwork scholarship (Driskell, Salas, & Driskell, 2018) to examine

the relationships between team processes (e.g., helping behavior),

emergent states (e.g., positive affective tone), and outcomes

(e.g., leader behaviors). Specifically, this paper examines the team

process of helping behavior and resulting leader affective

perceptions as contextual and relational antecedents to leadership

and is the first we know of to acknowledge and test the upward

influence of teams in this fashion. We contribute to work on how

the emergent state of affective tone provides social cues which

influence behavior in organizational settings—emotions as social

information (Liu et al., 2015; Van Kleef, 2009)—by demonstrating

that perceptions of affective tone at the team level function in a

similar fashion to the individual level. Finally, we add to the nascent

research examining abusive and empowering leadership as outcomes

of team processes and emergent states, asking when and why

supervisors engage in employee mistreatment and positive

leadership.

FIGURE 1 Theoretical model. L, variable reported by leaders; F,

variable reported by followers

758 SMALLFIELD ET AL.