When is an Authoritarian Leader Perceived as More Abusive:
Investigations of the Effect of Subordinates’ Ideal and Typical
Leadership Schema
Abstract
Previous research on antecedents of abusive supervision has focused on
supervisors’ stable characteristics but has not focused on subordinates’
dynamic cognitive leadership processes. Drawing from leadership
categorization theory, we propose that authoritarian leadership
activates subordinates’ anti-prototype of leaders and perceptions of
more abusive supervision. Moreover, such a relationship is moderated by
subordinates’ ideal and typical leadership schema, with the former
representing individual preference and the latter representing the
social norm. Using an experiment (N = 344) and a multi-wave field
study (N = 249), we found that subordinates holding high ideal
leadership prototypicality (e.g., my ideal leader is sensitive) and low
typical leadership anti-prototypicality (e.g., other leaders are
domineering) perceive more leadership anti-prototypicality and more
abusive supervision when faced with authoritarian leadership. Our
research enriches the existing literature on leadership by providing a
cognitive perspective that explains how subordinates’ implicit
leadership schemas play a role in the leadership perception process.