How and when abusive supervision leads to recovery activities: The recovery paradox and the conservation of resources perspectives

Abstract

Decades of research have shown that abusive supervision hurts employees' well-being. However, little is known about whether employees can recover from abuse during their leisure time. Building on the perspective of recovery paradox and the conservation of resources (COR) theory, we theorize that as an intense social stressor, daily abusive supervision depletes employees' resources and triggers their need for recovery, which in turn reduces physical and social recovery activities but increases low-effort activities. We also propose that employees' extraversion influence employees' choices of recovery activities when facing a paradoxical recovery situation (i.e., feeling too exhausted to engage in active recovery activities. To test our hypotheses, we employed the experience sampling method to collect 1511 daily responses from 203 full-time employees. The results of the multilevel path analyses indicated that (a) abusive supervision increased employees' need for recovery, which in turn increased next-day positive moods via facilitating low-effort activities, and reduced next-day positive moods via inhibiting social activities; and (b) these indirect effects were strengthened for employees with lower (vs. higher) extraversion. Theoretical and practical implications are further discussed.