Abusive supervision and organizational citizenship behavior: A meta-analysis based on the perspective of multiple theories

While many studies have examined the relationship between abusive supervision and employee organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), most of them are conducted in isolation, giving inconsistent results and lacking a comprehensive and systematic framework on how and why abusive supervision influences employee OCB. This study attempted to create a consensus through meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) to identify how abusive supervision affects employee OCB. Through a review of the existing literature, we identified and examined four main mediators: emotional exhaustion, interactional justice, perceived organizational support, and organizational identification. The results of the meta-analysis of 436 independent samples (N=149797) showed that abusive supervision negatively affects employee OCB. Emotional exhaustion, perceived organizational support and organizational identification mediated the negative relationship between abusive supervision and employee OCB. Among them, perceived organizational support was the strongest mediating mechanism. We further discussed implications for theory and practice, and proposed directions for future research.