Bizcuits | The ambush of Abusive Supervision

Leanda Lee

You invest in Human Resource Management. You take pains to understand people management or bring HR professionals to do the work. They sit at the top of the hierarchy because business in the post-industrial service-based sector is all about people, and their connections with each other and your customers. This HR team astutely manages the process of attracting, recruiting, selecting, training and career development all geared to the particular needs of each role in the company. You might even consciously build an employee brand.

HR then thinks about the day-to-day experience of ‘team members’: how well they perform, how to measure it, what the company can do to help staff perform well, after all, it is a two-way street. You invest in training and upskilling, giving your staff the resources to do the job and removing the obstacles and system inefficiencies.

The company considers old methods and current ideas: you try to maximize employee engagement and motivation, job satisfaction, diversity, organisational commitment, building trust, respect, loyalty and well-being, and facilitate work-life balance; you minimize ambiguities of roles, harassment, injustices, stressors, and discrimination…the list goes on.

Or, you don’t consciously do any of it.

Somehow through luck, the characteristics and life philosophies of the leaders, legacy systems and workplace norms and culture, the work gets done, people are happy, turnover is low and it all works.

Until, that is, all your hard work is ambushed by a solitary individual, the supervisor.

Much of a company’s good HR work and leadership can be undermined by The Supervisor; more precisely, The Abusive Supervisor.

The supervisor-employee relationship is the most important in the company, and a good relationship filters through to staff well-being, performance, and career progression. In a bad relationship, the supervisor (ab)uses the power imbalance with non-physical hostility against their direct reports: derogation, explosive outbursts, and undermining. Staff respond with less conscientiousness – they do less work and are less prepared to help-out and do over-time. More extreme responses include theft, sabotage, insubordination and other deviant behaviour, but these depend on the degree of power-imbalance. The more power the abusive supervisor has, the less visible is the retaliation. It’s there, just not where management can see it.

It’s not the direct impact on staff alone that makes The Abusive Supervisor so dangerous. All those great HR practices that you have put together and which were designed to nurture and develop staff will lose credibility. If staff are treated with abuse, there is a clear inconsistency in the corporate message. Staff will see the abusive treatment as the fault of the company and the upper levels of management because they are legally and morally responsible for what the supervisor does. If the company does nothing to fix the problem or reduce the abuse, you can tell your staff how much you value them and their well-being until you are blue in the face, but they won’t believe you.

If aware of any abuse and you ignore it, it suggests that you are potentially over-estimating the levels of staff tolerance or underestimating their professional sensitivities. Either way, you are doing damage to the company, your employees and your own good name by not dealing with it. The crunch comes when being ignorant is mistaken for ignoring.

What are the signs? A decreasing work ethic and attempts to restore a sense of justice via employee deviance, against both the company and the supervisor, but more so against the supervisor when there is a high intention to quit and when the power imbalance is less. So, check with the most senior underlings and those with greater opportunities and skill-levels to quit, for those are the ones most likely to give you a hint of what might be going down in your work-place.