A non-linear relationship between abusive supervision and subordinates’ job performance.

While abusive supervision is considered to have a uniformly negative impact on the employees, activation theory of stress depicts a slightly more complicated picture on such relationship. More specifically, by invoking activation theory of stress, we propose that abusive supervision can also arouse employees resources, to some extent, while it also consume their resources such that there is a non-linear relationship between abusive supervision and employee job performance. We further develop and test an interactive non-linear model to explain how and when this non-linear relationship becomes more pronounced based on employees goal orientations, including learning, performance proving, and performance avoiding goal orientations. We hypothesize the non-linear effect of abusive supervision is stronger when employees hold high learning or low performance (proving and avoiding) goal orientations. Results using data collected from 573 Hong Kong supervisor-subordinate dyads provide support to our non-linear model of abusive supervision