Abusive Supervision in Agencies: The Role of Gender in Reporting and Complaint Success

Even though studies often examine supervisory acts of non-physical aggression (i.e., abusive supervision) towards subordinates, most examine either the antecedents or the adverse outcomes of abusive supervision. Similar to physical and sexual abuse, many organizations, especially in the public sector, have a process in place to handle abusive supervision. Yet research has largely ignored what happens during this process. More specifically, no studies were found to examine subordinate reporting of abusive supervision (i.e., non-violent behaviors that are non-sexual) and whether complainants were effective. Furthermore, scholars recently called for aggression research to examine the role gender plays in this process. The present study seeks to fill this lacuna in the literature, by investigating the impact of gender in reporting abusive supervision and complaint success. After examining Merit Principles Survey Path 1, several interesting findings emerged. First, the gender of the subordinate and the hierarchical aggressor were found to impact reporting decisions. Gender dissimilarity (i.e., the gender mismatch between the subordinate and the manager) did not seem to affect reporting decisions. Next, the gender of the subordinate was found to affect complaint success, while the gender of the hierarchical aggressor did not. Nevertheless, gender dissimilarity did affect complaint success. The implications of the findings are thoroughly discussed in the article.