With an open hand and a clenched fist : Supervisors’ two-faced response to past abusive behavior

Extant research has highlighted the notion that abusive supervision is a destructive and immoral form of leader behavior. However, research largely ignores how supervisors respond to their own abusive behavior, and research that has addressed this question assumes that leaders genuinely seek to repair relationships after an episode of abuse. In contrast, we draw upon and integrate impression management and construction theory with moral identity theory to explore the duplicitous responses of supervisors to their own abusive behavior the prior day. Specifically, across a three-week experience sampling study of supervisors, our results show that for those low on moral identity, prior day abusive supervision negatively predicts supervisors’ moral self-concept the next day. Such a reduction in moral self-concept then predicts simultaneous public ingratiation and continued passive-aggressive abuse. This study extends impression management and cycles of abuse research by exposing the critical roles of moral identity and moral self-concept as determinants of supervisors’ responses to their own past abusive behavior, while also showing that a supervisor’s public behaviors may be matched by contradictory private behaviors.