Demonstrating the Psychological Aspects of Stressors and Abusive Supervision Behavior: Attainment of Sustainability Under the Rubric of Resources Theory

This article builds on the conservation of resources (COR) theory and the challenge–hindrance stressors framework to propose a model for understanding and investigating why and when these two distinct categorized stressors similarly promote the display of abusive supervision behavior. The data from 228 supervisors and subordinates are selected by using the time-lagged method. Prior to hypothesis testing, we first conducted confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) of the proposed models in Lisrel software. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed why and when two distinct categorized stressors positively relate to ego depletion and thus, in turn, promote the display of abusive supervision behavior. The bootstrap methods confirmed the mediating effect of ego depletion and the moderated-mediation role of emotional intelligence (EI). The findings show that both challenge and hindrance stressors are positively related to ego depletion and that ego depletion is positively associated with abusive supervision behavior. Results suggest that challenge and hindrance stressors have similar positive effects on abusive supervision behavior via the mediating effect of ego depletion. In addition, we find that supervisors’ EI weakens the positive relationship between challenge stressors and ego depletion, and it also weakens the positive relationship between hindrance stressors and ego depletion. This study extends the current literature by directly testing resource depletion as a mediating mechanism and resource replenishment as a boundary condition of the effect of work stressors.