Unleashing the Underlying Mechanism to Reduce Abusive Supervision

Abusive supervision can be extremely damaging to an organization’s bottom line. However, a scarce number of studies have identified the source of abusive supervision. The current research aims to investigate the impact of role conflict on abusive supervision in the presence of supervisor frustration. Additionally, we sought to examine the role of psychological capital as a boundary condition. Data were collected from nurses through a survey sent out to hospital head nurses in Pakistan. After discarding incomplete data, the final sample size was 304. After validating the model, Hayes Process Macros was utilized to test the proposed relationships. Findings revealed that role conflicts have a positive significant association with abusive supervision. Additionally, frustration mediates the relationship between role conflict and abusive supervision. Further, we found that psychological capital moderated the relationship between frustration and abusive supervision. It was analyzed that role conflict leads to abusive supervision through supervisor frustration and psychological capital moderates the indirect relationship. Findings will help to improve the head nurse’s (supervisor’s) abusive behavior and other counterproductive practices by identifying its antecedents, which are role conflict, supervisor frustration, and psychological capital.