Why is your boss making you sick? A longitudinal investigation modeling time‐lagged relations between abusive supervision and employee physical health

• Author: Douglas J. Brown,Huiwen Lian,Samuel Hanig,Rochelle Evans,Lindie H. Liang
• Published date: 01 November 2018
• Date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2248

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Why is your boss making you sick? A longitudinal investigation

modeling time‐lagged relations between abusive supervision

and employee physical health

Lindie H. Liang

1

|Samuel Hanig

2

|Rochelle Evans

2

|Douglas J. Brown

2

|Huiwen Lian

3

1

Lazaridis School of Business and Economics,

Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario,

Canada

2

Department of Psychology, University of

Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

3

Department of Management, Gatton School

of Business and Economics, University of

Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, U.S.A.

Correspondence

Lindie H. Liang, Lazaridis School of Business

and Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University, 75

University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario

N2L3C5, Canada.

Email: lliang@wlu.ca

Funding information

Social Sciences and Humanities Research

Council of Canada, Grant/Award Number:

435‐2014‐0353; National Natural Science

Foundation of China, Grant/Award Number:

71771133

Summary

Although an abundance of cross‐sectional data have linked abusive supervision with employees'

experience of health‐related problems, further research accounting for the temporal dynamics of

these variables is needed to establish causality. Furthermore, the process by which abusive

supervision relates to subordinate health problems requires greater clarification. In a 1‐year

longitudinal cross‐lagged investigation, we sought to test the time‐lagged relationship between

abusive supervision and employee physical health; additionally, we test rumination as a cognitive

process that mediates this time‐lagged relationship while modeling other relevant social and

motivational mediators. Our results indicate that subordinate ruminative thinking about their

experiences of abusive supervision mediates the time‐lagged association between abusive

supervision and physical health problems. These findings suggest that reducing ruminative

thinking may limit the long‐term impact of abusive supervision on employees' physical health.

KEYWORDS

abusive supervision, cross‐lagged paneldesign, occupational health, rumination

1|INTRODUCTION

My boss really drove me up the wall to a point where I

started developing stomach problems, which my doctor

linked to stress.

—A story shared by an employee on the British Broadcasting

Company (BBC) Website following a news story on bad bosses and

workplace stress (Kelloway, Sivanathan, Francis, & Barling, 2005).

Employees' poor physical health, such as back pain, headaches,

gastrointestinal problems, and sleeplessness, is estimated to cost

organizations in the United States billions of dollars annually in

healthcare costs, absenteeism due to sickness, lost productivity, and

compensation claims (Quick, Quick, Nelson, & Hurrell, 1997; Tepper,

Duffy, Henle, & Lambert, 2006). The majority of these health prob-

lems can be attributed to lifestyle factors, including one's work

environment (Glazer & Beehr, 2005; Quick et al., 1997). In the work-

place, leader behaviors have been directly implicated with employee

health and safety outcomes (Kelloway & Barling, 2010). In particular,

interacting with an abusive supervisor—a supervisor who is perceived

to engage in the “sustained display of hostile verbal and nonverbal

behaviors, excluding physical contact”(Tepper, 2000, p. 178) but

including yelling at, ridiculing, or humiliating employees—has been

linked to employee health problems (Duffy, Ganster, & Pagon, 2002;

Restubog, Scott, & Zagenczyk, 2011; Tepper, 2000). In support of this

notion, recent work has found that symptoms suffered by victims of

abusive supervision can be suggestive of a post‐traumatic stress

disorder diagnosis (Tepper, Simon, & Park, 2017), and meta‐analytic

results indicate that both supervisor aggression (r

corrected

=−.20,

95% confidence interval [CI] −.28 to −.12 [Hershcovis & Barling,

2010]) and destructive leadership (r=−.35, 95% CI −.40 to −.29

[Schyns & Schilling, 2013]) negatively relate to subordinate physical

well‐being.

Based on these findings, one may be inclined to conclude that the

“long term and frequent exposition to destructive behavior from a

person that is in charge is likely to cause stress and lead to lower

well‐being”(Schyns & Schilling, 2013, p. 143). Yet these conclusions

are entirely based on data from cross‐sectional studies. Given that

cross‐sectional designs cannot model the temporal ordering of

variables or reciprocal relationships (Finkel, 1995; Fischer, Dietz, &

Received: 1 October 2016 Revised: 3 October 2017 Accepted: 23 October 2017

DOI: 10.1002/job.2248

1050 © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2018;39:1050–1065.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job

Antonakis, 2016), there is a dearth of concrete evidence that supervi-

sors behaving badly actually cause subordinates to have deteriorated

physical health. Additionally, although social and motivational pro-

cesses—such as need theories (Lian, Ferris, & Brown, 2012), justice

theories (Tepper, 2000; Tepper, 2007), and exchange theories

(Mitchell & Ambrose, 2007)—have been typically invoked to explain

the negative effect of abusive supervision and its consequences, little

is known about the cognitive processes in explaining the consequences

of abusive supervision. Given that abusive supervision is subjective

in nature, we believe that cognitive processes are especially relevant

in understanding health‐related outcomes (Brooks, 2014; Crum,

Salovey, & Achor, 2013; Denson, Spanovic, & Miller, 2009); in particu-

lar, rumination, with its effect of prolonging exposure to a stressor

through cognitive reenactment, is particularly relevant to the develop-

ment of somatic symptoms (Denson, Spanovic, et al., 2009). As such,

the omission of cognitive theories in explaining subordinate health

outcomes in relation to abusive supervision limits our understanding.

In the present paper, we use a longitudinal cross‐lagged design to

provide an appropriate test of the relationship between abusive

supervision and subordinate health (Maxwell & Cole, 2007; Maxwell,

Cole, & Mitchell, 2011) while investigating whether the cognitive pro-

cess of rumination explains this relationship. By employing a cross‐

lagged design, whereby abusive supervision and employee health out-

comes were measured three times across the span of 1 year, we make

an effort to understand the temporal ordering and the directionality of

the association between abusive supervision and employee health

(Finkel, 1995). Additionally, modeling the variables' own history is

especially important when studying health‐related outcomes. In par-

ticular, the condition of one's health at a particular time point depends

on one's previous health history; thus, using a longitudinal design

would help consolidate a more fundamental understanding of whether

the temporal dynamics of one's change in physical health results from

internally fluctuating factors or from external factors (Liu, Mo, Song, &

Wang, 2016). Furthermore, we provide a test of whether cognitive

theories of rumination (Nolen‐Hoeksema, Wisco, & Lyubomirsky,

2008; Smith & Alloy, 2009) account for the negative effects of super-

visor abuse on subordinate health while modeling plausible alternative

explanations.

Our study makes several important contributions to the literature.

First, much of the data examining abusive supervision and employee

outcomes are cross‐sectional in nature (for exceptions, see Lian,

Ferris, Morrison, & Brown, 2014; Simon, Hurst, Kelley, & Judge,

2015); however, cross‐sectional research designs are mute about the

directionality of effects. Thus, only using cross‐sectional studies to

examine the relationship between abusive supervision and employee

outcomes limits our understanding of both the temporal ordering

and the relationship directionality of these variables. This issue is

especially relevant when testing mediational models, as mediational

hypotheses are causal in nature (James & Brett, 1984; Vancouver &

Carlson, 2015). Although experimentally manipulating these variables

would be the most desirable method of determining causality, exper-

imental manipulation would not be considered ethically appropriate

in our case, given the nature of our variables of interest. Hence, the

incorporation of time lags into our study design increases our ability

to study cause and effect without relying on experimentation, which,

in turn, provides a stronger empirical test than cross‐sectional designs.

In so doing, we make an effort to understand the direction of the

association between abusive supervision and employee health (Finkel,

1995) as well as providing a better understanding of how the effects

of abusive supervision unfold and persist over time. We also answer

the call for leadership researchers to use longitudinal methods that

are more appropriate for theory testing, as opposed to using cross‐

sectional methods, which may merely be easy to apply (Ployhart,

Holtz, & Bliese, 2002).

Second, although social and motivational processes have been

commonly invoked and tested to explain the negative effects of

abusive supervision, these theories offer little insight into the role

of employees' cognitive processes in the relationship between

abusive supervision and employee health. Given the integral role

that cognitive processes play in determining how stressors affect

subordinates' health‐related outcomes, we argue for the integration

of cognitive processes into theoretical explanations linking the

effects of abusive supervision—a stressor—to employee health. In

particular, our test of rumination as the mediator both extends prior

research on mechanisms of abusive supervision while incorporating

a uniquely cognitive perspective to understanding the specific

relationship between abusive supervision and employee health.

Our investigation of cognitive processes would aid in developing a

novel theoretical account of how abusive supervision influences

long‐term subordinate health outcomes, thus contributing to theory

development (Sutton & Staw, 1995). In addition, by better under-

standing the role of cognitive processes as a potential mediator, it

facilitates the development of relevant interventions for practi-

tioners (i.e., change employees' ways of thinking and mindsets when

facing workplace stressors).

Third, although the leadership literature is replete with diverse

theoretical accounts and mechanisms to explain why abusive supervi-

sion has negative effects on subordinates, each account has typically

been tested independently, which leaves us with an incomplete

picture as to which ones are most central to understanding abusive

supervision (Tepper et al., 2017). In our study, we not only control

for plausible alternative explanations but also test whether rumination

can explain the abusive supervision and subordinate health relation-

ship above and beyond these commonly invoked theoretical

accounts. In essence, we pit different theoretical explanations against

one another to determine the winner (Leavitt, Mitchell, & Peterson,

2010). In so doing, we cull various theoretical mechanisms, which

not only heeds the call for leadership scholars to model mediators

simultaneously (Fischer et al., 2016) but also contributes to

“important knowledge advances to theory and practice”(Van de Ven

& Johnson, 2006, p. 814).

To foreshadow our theoretical development, we first discuss the

relationship between abusive supervision and subordinate physical

health. We then put forth cognitive theories of rumination and

propose rumination as a plausible mechanism that explains the time‐

lagged relationship between abusive supervision and subordinate

physical health. Finally, we discuss other theories that explain this

relationship and identify other variables corresponding to each of

these theoretical accounts that may serve as alternative mediating

mechanisms to rumination.

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