Publication Date

2017-07-13

Availability

Embargoed

Embargo Period

2019-07-13

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PHD)

Department

Management (Business)

Date of Defense

2017-06-06

First Committee Member

Marie T. Dasborough

Second Committee Member

Gergana Todorova

Third Committee Member

Chester A. Schriesheim

Fourth Committee Member

Nathan J. Hiller

Abstract

This dissertation explores how to attenuate the negative influence of team abusive supervision on followers’ creativity. First, it is not feasible to interfere with these negative impacts without the knowledge of the underlying processes. Essay 1 unravels how team abusive supervision gradually leads to followers’ creativity from a team process perspective by identifying team state mindfulness, team state negative affect, team task conflict, and team relationship conflict as critical mechanisms. Using a time-lagged multilevel field study of 92 teams, I found that abusive supervision aggravated relationship conflict via diminishing mindfulness levels in employees, and that abusive supervision exacerbated task conflict through elevating negative affect and decreasing team mindfulness levels. The augmented levels of relationship conflict in turn harmed individual creativity. However, followers’ creativity is not only influenced by team processes, but by leaders’ and followers’ individual differences as well. As such, essay 2 introduces leaders’ and followers’ individual differences (i.e., state positive affect) and examines how the state positive affect of both leaders and followers alters followers’ interpretations of leader mistreatment. Analyses of multilevel, multisource, and multiphase data show that leaders’ and followers’ state positive affect interactively determine the extent to which followers attribute abusive behaviors to their leaders’ performance promotion motives. Such attributions in turn benefit followers’ creativity. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Keywords

abusive supervision; creativity; affect; mindfulness; team conflict

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