How Bottom-Line Mentality Leads to Abusive Supervision? Investigating the Mediating Effects of Anxiety

PURPOSE: By integrating the theory of workplace anxiety with a self-regulatory theory, this study investigates the mediating role of workplace anxiety in the relationship between leader bottom-line mentality and abusive supervision targeting the follower, as well as the moderating effect of rules climate on leaders’ emotion-behavior process. METHODS: A total of 393 employees and 91 supervising managers participated in the multi-source, two-wave survey. To test our hypotheses, we performed the regression analysis and conducted bootstrapping analyses using the Hayes PROCESS Model. RESULTS: Findings indicated that leader bottom-line mentality has a positive indirect relationship with abusive supervision via workplace anxiety. In addition, rules climate weakens abusive supervision for workplace anxiety, revealing a significant moderate effect. CONCLUSION: Leaders with high BLM encapsulate apprehension and tension, which are deficient in fostering workplace anxiety as an important affect process that facilitates abusive supervision. During this process, we identify rules climate as an important boundary condition for our model and theorization.