Barbara Wisse

Destructive Leadership Psychological abuse by supervisors occurs when employees are subjected to verbal and non-verbal aggression over an extended period (Tepper, 2000). This includes behaviors such as outbursts of anger, ridiculing employees, invading their privacy, falsely blaming them, as well as manipulating, ignoring, and isolating them. International research shows a prevalence of destructive leadership of 13.6% (Schat et al., 2006).

Kimberley Breevaart, Dr. Barbara Wisse and Birgit Schyns Abstract While research on abusive supervision is thriving, we still know very little about the sustained nature of the phenomenon. Additionally, most papers focusing on the prolonged character of the detrimental relational dynamic take a within-dyad perspective, largely ignoring within-person, group or other external influences. Addressing these gaps in the literature, we introduce the Barriers Model of Abusive Supervision.

Introduction Narcissism, a personality trait characterized by grandiose and overly positive self-views, is not only rising in Western individualistic countries (Twenge et al., 2008; Twenge and Foster, 2010), but also appears to be societally valued as evidenced by narcissists’ emergence as leaders (Brunell et al., 2008; Nevicka et al., 2011a; Grijalva et al., 2015a).