In today's fast-paced business environment, one of the most important challenges for organizations is enhancing the creative capabilities of their employees (Hirst, Knippenberg, & Zhou, 2009). Studies have demonstrated that employee creativity contributes to organizational innovation, productivity, and survival (Zhou, 2003), and forms the basis of competitive advantage (Shalley & Gilson, 2004). Given the importance of employee creativity, empirical studies have investigated various facilitators of creativity, such as supervisor support, developmental feedback, and creative self-efficacy (Amabile et al., 2004, Tierney and Farmer, 2002 and Zhou, 2003). Scholars have focused on the role of supervisors' behaviors as one of the important factors related to employee creativity (e.g., Shalley and Gilson, 2004 and Zhang and Bartol, 2010). As a representative of the organization and a major social and economic exchange partner in the workplace, a supervisor can play a key role in facilitating employee creativity (Shalley & Gilson, 2004). The focus of prior research on the effect of supervisors on creativity has predominantly centered on their positive or supportive role (George and Zhou, 2001, Mumford et al., 2002 and Zhou, 2003). For example, Amabile and colleagues (2004) found that supervisor support was positively related to the peer-rated creativity of subordinates working on creative projects in seven different companies.
Recently, organizational research has been increasingly focused on the “dark side of leadership” (e.g., Aryee et al., 2007 and Griffin and Lopez, 2005). An important reason for the current interest is the increase in frequency of destructive supervisor behaviors in the workplace (Griffin and Lopez, 2005 and Hershcovis, 2011), and their considerable impact on organizational and individual outcomes (Aryee et al., 2007 and Tepper, 2007). According to Tepper, Moss, and Duffy (2011), in the U.S., more than 13% of the workforce experienced abusive supervision or non-physical hostility over a 12 month period (Schat, Frone, & Kelloway, 2006). In particular, abusive supervision, which refers to sustained forms of nonphysical hostility perpetrated by a supervisor against his/her subordinates (Tepper, 2000), has been considered an important factor that may impact employee attitudes and job performance (Harris, Kacmar, & Zivnuska, 2007). Although supervisors often engage in demanding or abusive behaviors to rapidly enhance individual performance or to convey the importance of specific objectives to their employees (Campbell et al., 2007, Ferris et al., 2007 and Zapf and Gross, 2001), little is known about the relationship between abusive supervision and creativity. Thus, in this study we investigate the effects of abusive supervision on creativity to enhance our understanding of the relationship between supervisor behaviors and creativity. Specifically, by applying activation theory (Gardner and Cummings, 1988 and Scott, 1966), we posit a curvilinear relationship between abusive supervision and employee creativity.
We test our hypothesis using a sample of employees in a large public organization in South Korea. South Korea is characterized by a higher power distance and performance-oriented culture (Fukuyama, 1995 and Hofstede, 1980). Supervisors from high power distance cultures expect their followers to be more obedient to and to accept their directive influence (Hofstede, 1980). Lower status followers in high power distance cultures believe that their supervisors' directives should be respected and shown deference, and so, such employees have a higher tolerance for unfair treatment from such authority figures (Gudykunst & Ting-Toomey, 1988). Further, due to supervisors' high performance orientation, abusive behaviors have been shown to be relatively frequent in South Korea (Ashkanasy, 2002). These characteristics may lead followers to better deal with a moderate level of supervisors' abuse and to consider a low level of abusive supervision as being laissez-faire, that is, that the supervisor is uninvolved and detached from the activities of the employees. Therefore, our research context is well-suited for the study of the curvilinear relationship between abusive supervision and creativity. In summary, this study is designed to address an important research question: “How does abusive supervision influence employee creativity?” In order to answer this question, our study investigates the curvilinear relationship (inverted U-shaped form) between abusive supervision and creativity, applying activation theory (Gardner and Cummings, 1988 and Scott, 1966). Thus, our study takes an important step toward developing a better understanding of how supervisors' behavior in general, and abusive supervision in particular, affect employee's creative performance.
