Following the abusive leader? When and how abusive supervision influences victim’s creativity through observers

Abstract

Despite several studies exploring the effect of abusive supervision on employee creativity from various perspectives, the social side of creativity remains largely unexplored. Building on the social identity model of organizational leadership and the dynamic componential theory of creativity, we purported that abusive supervision would dampen victims’ creativity through coworkers’ ostracism, but this effect would critically depend on leaders’ in-group prototypicality. Results from a multi-wave and multi-source survey and a scenario experiment provided converging support to the proposed model. Specifically, we found that abusive supervisor was negatively related to employee creativity via coworkers’ ostracism only among leaders high (vs. low) in-group prototypicality. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.