The Organizational Halo: How Perceived Philanthropy Awareness Curbs Abusive Supervision via Moral Pride

Abstract

Abusive supervision remains a pervasive and damaging phenomenon in organizations, prompting a critical need to understand preventive mechanisms. We adopt a leader-centric, actor-focused perspective to investigate how a positive organizational context can inhibit leaders’ destructive behaviors. Drawing on Affective Events Theory (AET), we propose that leaders’ awareness of their organization’s philanthropic activities serves as a positive, morally salient event that generates feelings of moral pride. This pride, in turn, is theorized to reduce the likelihood of abusive supervision. Furthermore, we posit that this process is contingent on leaders’ moral reputation maintenance concerns, such that the negative relationship between moral pride and abusive supervision is stronger for leaders who are highly concerned with being perceived as moral. We tested this model using a three-wave survey study involving 434 leaders. The results support our hypotheses, indicating that perceived philanthropy awareness is positively associated with moral pride, which, in turn, predicts lower abusive supervision. This indirect effect is significantly stronger for leaders with high moral reputation maintenance concerns. Our findings contribute to the literature by identifying a novel, positive, and self-regulatory pathway for preventing abusive supervision and showing that applying AET to understand how macro-level organizational good deeds can translate into improved micro-level leader conduct.