When Power Feels Precarious: How Leaders’ Contempt Turns Threats into Abuse

What is it about?

This study explores how leaders’ feelings of threat from high-performing employees can lead to harmful behavior. It argues that leaders who perceive their authority as challenged may respond with abusive supervision—ridicule or verbal attacks—that discourages organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), or voluntary efforts that benefit the organization. The study also predicts that leaders’ dispositional contempt, or tendency to look down on others, intensifies this destructive dynamic. Using three-wave survey data from 231 leader–follower pairs in Pakistan, the researchers found that when leaders perceive their position in the hierarchy as threatened, they are more likely to act abusively toward high-performing subordinates. This, in turn, leads those subordinates to withdraw from helpful, voluntary behaviors that typically benefit the organization. Leaders with a strong sense of contempt are especially prone to such behavior: their disdain not only increases direct abuse but also strengthens the link between feeling threatened and acting aggressively. For organizations, the findings highlight a damaging cycle in which insecure or contemptuous leaders retaliate when subordinates excel, undermining morale and reducing voluntary engagement. Human resource departments should address these risks by cultivating leadership development that emphasizes humility, respect, and appreciation for employee contributions. They can also curb contemptuous tendencies through coaching, feedback systems, and accountability mechanisms, helping ensure that leaders respond to success with support rather than hostility.

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Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The uniqueness of this study lies in showing how leaders’ feelings of status threat and dispositional contempt jointly explain why and when supervisors become abusive. It extends prior work by identifying abusive supervision as the behavioral link between threatened authority and employees’ withdrawal from voluntary behaviors. By isolating contempt as both a direct and indirect catalyst, the study offers fresh insight into how insecurity and personality traits combine to harm leader–follower relationships and team cooperation. This research is timely amid growing pressure in performance-driven organizations, where competent employees can unintentionally trigger leader insecurity. As workplaces flatten hierarchies and reward individual achievement, authority threats are becoming more common. The findings stress the need for emotionally intelligent, humble leaders who celebrate employee success rather than react defensively. In hierarchical cultures like Pakistan’s, fostering such leadership is vital for collaboration and organizational well-being.