Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: How and When Machiavellian Leaders Demonstrate Strategic Abuse

The extant literature has largely conceptualized abusive supervision as a hot and impulsive form of aggression. In this paper, we offer a cold and strategic perspective on how abusive supervision might be used strategically to achieve goals. Drawing on the Machiavellian literature and social interaction theory of aggression, we develop a moderated serial mediation model, in which leader Machiavellianism predicts their strategic use of abusive supervision on subordinates via the mediating role of leaders’ guanxi with direct supervisor. We further theorize that this mediation effect is more pronounced when guanxi among team members (team member guanxi, TMG) is stronger, because Mach leaders are more likely to perceive high TMG as a threat to their power. Finally, we propose that Mach leaders’ strategic use of abusive supervision has negative implications for team outcomes, manifested in low levels of team voice and team organizational citizenship behaviors toward fellow team members (OCBI). Analyses of two studies—Study 1 using multi-wave data (355 leaders) from a US sample and Study 2 using a multi-wave, multi-source, and multilevel data (1252 subordinates and 273 leaders) from a Chinese sample—corroborated our model. This study provides a comprehensive examination of who, how, and when strategic abuse unfolds in the workplace and its negative implication for team outcomes.