Abusive supervision and work-family conflict: an empirical investigation of Indian professionals

The study aims to investigate the direct and indirect effect of subordinate’s perceived abusive supervision (AS) on his/her work–family conflict (WFC) and family–work conflict (FWC). Although prior studies have empirically explored the direct effect, but the role of mediators like compulsory citizenship behavior, burnout and stress transfer explaining the indirect effect has seldom been reported.

The study draws cross-sectional dyadic data from multiple sources (both job incumbent and the spouse). A final sample of 188 was used to test the hypotheses using SmartPLS.

The result reports positive relationship between AS and inter-role conflict (WFC and FWC). The findings also reported compulsory citizenship behavior (CCB) partially mediating the positive relationship between AS and WFC and AS and FWC. Also, the positive relationship between AS and WFC is partially (serial) mediated by CCB and burnout, and similarly, the association between AS and FWC is partially (serial) mediated by CCB and stress transmission.

The study makes several valuable contributions to the extant literature; first, it is the only study to explore the direct and indirect effect of AS on inter-role conflict (WFC and FWC) in Indian organizations. Second, the mediational role of CCB (as explained by the conservation of resources theory) and burnout and stress transmission (as explained by the spillover and crossover theory) offers rare insight about the process that explains the relationship between the focal constructs.