How does goal orientation affect employees’ perception of abusive supervisors?

Goal orientation shapes employees’ approach to and interpretation of workplace aspects such as supervisors’ behavior. However, research has not fully examined the effect of goal orientation as an antecedent of abusive supervision. Drawing from victim precipitation theory, this study aims to fill this research gap by investigating how employees’ goal orientation influences their perception of abusive supervision.

Two studies were conducted to test the hypotheses. In Study 1, 181 employees in 45 departments participated in the survey, and multilevel confirmatory factor analysis, two-level path model and polynomial regression were used. In Study 2, 108 working adults recruited from a professional online survey platform participated in a two-wave time-lagged survey. Confirmatory factor analysis, hierarchical linear regression and polynomial regression were used.

This study found that employees’ learning goal orientation was negatively related to their perception of abusive supervision. In contrast, performance-avoidance goal orientation was positively related to their perception of abusive supervision, whereas performance-approach goal orientation was unrelated to this perception. Moreover, employees’ perception of abusive supervision was greater when learning and performance-approach goal orientation alignment occurred at lower rather than higher levels, and when performance-avoidance and performance-approach goal orientation alignment occurred at higher rather than lower levels.

This research identified two novel victim traits as antecedents of abusive supervision – employees’ learning goal orientation and performance-avoidance goal orientation. Furthermore, adopting a multiple goal perspective, the authors examined the combined effects of goal orientation on employees’ perception of abusive supervision.