Supervisor-directed deviance is a well-established consequence of abusive supervision. However, prior accounts of the abuse–deviance relationship have overlooked the role played by power embedded in subordinates’ informal social context. To address this gap, we draw on power-dependence theory and use a social network approach to explain the link between abusive supervision and supervisor-directed deviance. In doing so, we propose a three-way interaction in which the abuse–deviance relationship is impacted by two components of informal power: subordinate social network centrality and subordinate influence. In particular, we propose that the relationship will be the strongest when subordinates have high betweenness centrality and high influence. We gathered full social network data, as well as self-report surveys from 272 primary school teachers and government contract workers in Northern China. Our results provide support for the notion that supervisor-directed deviance emerges most strongly as a consequence of abusive supervision for employees who wield informal power in their organization.

监督者指导的越轨行为是滥用监督的公认后果。然而，先前对虐待-越轨关系的描述忽略了嵌入在下属非正式社会环境中的权力所起的作用。为了解决这一差距，我们借鉴了权力依赖理论并使用社交网络方法来解释滥用监督与监督者导向的偏差之间的联系。为此，我们提出了一种三向互动，其中滥用-越轨关系受到非正式权力的两个组成部分的影响：从属社交网络中心性和从属影响。特别地，我们认为当下属具有高中介中心性和高影响力时，这种关系将是最强的。我们收集了完整的社交网络数据，以及对华北地区 272 名小学教师和政府合同工的自我报告调查。我们的结果支持这样一种观点，即监督者导向的越轨行为最强烈地出现是对在组织中行使非正式权力的员工的滥用监督的结果。