This study explored how daily leader sleep influences their daily abusive supervisory behaviour and work unit engagement, using ego depletion theory.
Providing background they note:
· Abusive supervision is the “sustained display of hostile verbal and nonverbal behavior, excluding physical contact” of supervisors toward subordinates, as perceived by subordinates” (p3)
· Research as of 2015 was limited in that it focused more on outcomes of abusive supervision than the antecedents. Another limitation was that abusive supervision was typically studied as a static approach – e.g. it’s present or not, supervisors are abusive or not. This view didn’t properly account for daily fluctuations in abusive behaviour
· Prior work found that abusive supervisory behaviour varied more within-supervisors than it did between supervisors. That is, “supervisors exhibited more within-person variation in abusive behavior than was observed for comparisons between supervisors” (p4)
· Various factors are related to antecedents of abusive behaviours. This includes frustration with a lack of worker progress on a project, interpersonal conflict, encountering mistakes, etc. Self-regulation is a psychological process which urges and impulses are controlled
· Ego depletion theory describes how the ability to exert self-control varies over time. When this pool of self-regulatory resources are depleted, people are less able to regulate their responses (which prior work suggests depletions in resources relates more to negative behaviours)
· Lack of sleep, as this study evaluated, also leads to higher socially inappropriate behaviours. Thus, poor sleep is likely to affect self-regulation, thereby increasing propensity for abusive behaviour
Their conceptual model is shown below:
Results
Key findings were that:
· Sleep quality was statistically related to higher abusive supervisory behaviours
· However, against expectations, sleep quantity wasn’t found to be related
· Supervisor sleep quality—but not quantity—was also indirectly linked to abusive supervision via daily leader ego depletion and work unit engagement
· They argue these findings strengthened the view that leaders aren’t statically abusive or not, but rather the degree varies from day to day
· Thus, abusive supervision needs to account for not just the sustained nature of abusive behaviour but also the momentary abuse
Summarising key relationships, it’s noted that supervisors with poor sleep are more likely engage in abusive behaviours towards their team. Their team members, in response, are more likely to disengage from their work. Thus, performance in the organisation suffers.
They note that because daily abusive behaviours are associated with fluctuations in supervisor sleep quality, between-subject design studies are unlikely to miss these important relationships.
They were unable to explain why sleep quantity wasn’t related to abusive behaviour like sleep quality was. It could have been a sampling error, or perhaps supervisors are more aware of their sleep quantity and more carefully monitor their behaviour when they obtain less sleep quantity, but not so aware of their sleep quality.
Another possibility they raise is that maybe it relates to chronic sleep deprivation being a more powerful antecedent of abusive supervision than acute sleep loss.
Authors: Barnes, C. M., Lucianetti, L., Bhave, D. P., & Christian, M. S. (2015). Academy of Management Journal, 58(5), 1419-1437.
Study link: https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2013.1063
Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-wouldnt-like-me-when-im-sleepy-leaders-sleep-daily-ben-hutchinson
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