In this video, Dr. Nikos Dimotakis and PhD grad,
Sherry (Qiang) Fu, touch on their most recent in-press publication in the Journal of Applied Psychology covering abusive supervision. Congrats on this incredible accomplishment! See below for full citation.
Yoon., S., Koopman, J., Dimotakis, N., Simon, L., Liang, L. H., Ni., D., Zheng, X., Fu, S. Lee, Y. E., Tang, P. M., Ng., C. T. S., Bush, J., Darden, T., Forrester, J., Tepper, B., & Brown, D. (in press). Consistent and low is the only way to go: A polynomial regression approach to the effect of abusive supervision inconsistency. Journal of Applied Psychology.
Transcript:
Hi I'm Nikos Dimotakis. I'm in the department of management at Oklahoma State University on the organizational behavior side. We recently got a paper accepted at the Journal of Applied Psychology called "Consistent and Low is the Only Way to Go," talking about the experience of change and abuse supervision.
Abusive supervision is misbehavior by the supervisor essentially. Giving people the silent treatment, yelling at them, screaming at them, you know, taking credit for their work. That sort of thing. The usual response to these types of things is for people to say well stop doing it, right? So we're gonna go out and see who's engaging in those behaviors and you want to stop them. What we looked at is, we looked at how such behaviors at two time points might influence individuals, and we found that actually stopping or lowering the behavior is not necessarily good. Once people have been abused by their supervisor, they tend to be a little bit on edge. If the supervisor stops engaging in those behaviors, people are just waiting for the other shoe to drop again.
If they start engaging in those behaviors when they weren't before people get super anxious, they don't understand the world and so forth. Of course people that are consistently abusive are also pretty terrible. But, basically what we find is that the going to have a properly functional workplaces for those behaviors to just not occur for a consistent period of time, so thus consistent and low is the only way to go.
What year did you start on this? So a lot of these projects started in the early teens somewhere around 2012,2013, 2014, 2015 is where we started thinking about a lot of those things. Then there were a number of people that all kind of had end up at the same spot or in similar relationships for this thing to really pick up. Lisa Lambert from the Department of management, Sherry Fu who is now at Colorado State University, Joe Koopman Texas A&M University, all of them. We kind of each had to bring our own strengths, and our own kind of expertise to this, to kind of finally create some of these new methods that were required to examine these things properly.
