The dark side of leader-member exchange: Observers' reactions when leaders target their teammates for abuse

We draw on deonance theory and social learning theory to propose a framework that explains how individual team members with varying levels of leader-member exchange (LMX) with their team leader have different emotional and behavioral responses upon observing teammate-directed abusive supervision. After employing a social relations paradigm with two-wave round-robin data collected from a sample of 378 engineers on 89 work teams, we did not find that witnessing teammate-targeted abusive supervision increased sympathy for the targeted teammates, but we did find that observers with a higher level of LMX were more likely to legitimize such abuse and less likely to sympathize with its victims. Furthermore, we found that for individuals with a higher level of LMX, perceiving leaders' abusive supervision of teammates was negatively related to providing help to those teammates through the mediating role of sympathy for the teammates.