Asian J Bus Ethics (2015) 4:57–72 DOI 10.1007/s13520-015-0043-1 S P E C I A L I S S U E PA P E R

Abuse in the name of injustice: mechanisms of moral disengagement Raymond Loi 1 & Angela J. Xu 1 & Yan Liu 2

Received: 4 March 2015 / Accepted: 16 May 2015 / Published online: 6 June 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract Grounded in Bandura’s (Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory, 1986) social cognitive theory of moral thought and action, we develop a conceptual model linking supervisors’ perceptions of organizational injustice and abusive supervision with moral disengagement mechanisms acting as the underlying process. Specifically, we elaborate why and how supervisors’ experiences of each type of injustice (i.e., distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational) would trigger their adoption of distinctive moral disengagement mechanisms, which in turn lead to their abusive supervisory conduct. The present conceptual model sheds new light on linking organizational injustice to abusive supervision from a moral perspective. In addition, it also provides important theoretical and managerial implications to our current understanding of why and how abusive supervision happens. Keywords Organizational justice . Abusive supervision . Moral disengagement . Morality

Introduction Abusive supervision has received much research attention in the last decade (e.g., Lian et al. 2012; Tepper 2007). It refers to supervisors’ engagement in the sustained display of hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviors towards their subordinates, excluding

* Angela J. Xu [email protected] Raymond Loi [email protected] Yan Liu [email protected] 1

Department of Management and Marketing, University of Macau, Avenida da Universidade, Taipa, Macau, China

2

Department of Business Administration, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

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physical contact (Tepper 2000, 2007). Different from supervisory discipline or punishment that occurs when subordinates conduct behaviors deviated from normal expectations (Brown et al. 2005), abusive supervision happens even when subordinates have not done anything wrong (Tepper 2007). Abusive supervision is a serious problem to the organizations in terms of the economic loss involved (Tepper et al. 2006) and is deleterious to the employees in terms of diminished psychological well-being (Harvey et al. 2007). Most important of all, it is an unethical conduct in the workplace as the abusive behaviors violate the organization’s normative standards and employees’ moral expectations related to their supervisors (Ünal et al. 2012; Wright 2013). Therefore, it is being labeled as the Bdark side^ of leadership (Aryee et al. 2007; Liu et al. 2012b), and there is a pressing need for theory and research to explain why and how such unethical workplace behavior occurs. Unfortunately, comparing with the considerable research examining its harmful consequences, existing literature on this line of enquiry is relatively insufficient (Tepper 2007; Tepper et al. 2011). Among the limited studies investigating the antecedents of abusive supervision, supervisors’ subjective perception of unfairness within the organization has been identified as a core precursor (e.g., Aryee et al. 2007; Tepper et al. 2006). Surprisingly, these studies (e.g., Hoobler and Hu 2013; Tepper et al. 2006) mostly use supervisors’ affective responses like depression and negative affect to explain the impact of injustice on abusive supervision without recognizing that injustice may also affect abusive supervision through a cognitive process. Organizational justice is closely linked with people’s ethical assumptions about how human beings should be treated in the workplace (Loi et al. 2012). Any injustice treatment can be considered as the transgression of the normative standard of appropriate workplace conduct (Folger et al. 2005; Skitka 2009). As both the organizational justice and abusive supervision have their close connection to workplace ethics, people’s fundamental concern of morality may be the crucial point of contact between injustice and abusive supervision. In other words, organizational injustice as perceived by supervisors may trigger their abusive supervisory behavior because their concern of morality within the workplace has been infringed. Nevertheless, such linkage has not been theoretically established in current literature. This article aims to address this theoretical inadequacy. Drawing on social cognitive theory of moral thought and action (Bandura 1986), we develop a conceptual model (as presented in Fig. 1) in which moral disengagement acts as the cognitive underlying mechanism explaining how supervisors engage in abusive supervision as a result of receiving unfair treatment within the organization. Moral disengagement describes a set of cognitive justifications or psychosocial maneuvers that deactivate people’s moral self-regulation and allow them to commit acts such as abusive supervision, while avoiding self-censure experienced as anticipative guilt for detrimental conduct or anticipative shame for negative self-image (Bandura et al. 2001; Liu et al. 2012a). We contend that, in responding to four different types of workplace injustice: distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational (Colquitt 2001), supervisors would activate relevant mechanisms of moral disengagement that justify their subsequent abusive supervisory behavior. This article contributes to our knowledge of organizational justice and workplace ethics in several ways. First, it highlights the importance to understand injustice as a cause of supervisory abusive behavior from the context of morality. Grounded firmly in

Abuse in the name of injustice: mechanisms of moral disengagement Organizational Injustice

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Moral Disengagement Mechanisms Advantageous Comparison

Distributive Injustice Attribution of Blame

Procedural Injustice

Displacement of Responsibility Abusive Supervision Diffusion of Responsibility

Distorting the Consequences Interpersonal Injustice Dehumanization

Moral Justification Informational Injustice Euphemistic Language

Fig. 1 Conceptual model

the social cognitive theory (Bandura 1986), our conceptual model explains how supervisors disconnect themselves with their moral standards as primed by an unethical workplace phenomenon, i.e., their perceptions of organizational injustice. As supervisors are usually taken as the moral agents of the organization (Brown and Mitchell 2010; Wright 2013), this article adds to our knowledge on understanding why supervisors would violate their moral standards. It also provides important implications to the researchers and practitioners in managing abusive supervision. Second, this paper answers the calls (e.g., Martinko et al. 2013; Tepper 2007) for discovering the cognitive intervening mechanism underlying the causes of abusive supervisory behavior. It emphasizes the importance of using the socio-cognitive perspective to understand how injustice impacts abusive supervision and supplements existing literature which relies solely on the affective mechanism. Finally, by matching each type of injustice to the relevant moral disengagement mechanisms, this article provides a comprehensive model and further clarifies the unique influence of each type of injustice on abusive supervision.

Theoretical background and propositions Organizational injustice and abusive supervision Organizational justice is a prime concern for employees. Justice researchers (e.g., Colquitt 2001; Colquitt et al. 2001) commonly identify four types of fairness

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perceptions in the workplace: distributive justice, referring to employees’ concern about the fairness of resource distribution; procedural justice, referring to employees’ attention to the fairness of decision-making procedures leading to outcomes; interpersonal justice, referring to the fairness related to interpersonal respect employees receive when organizational procedures are executed; informational justice, referring to the accuracy and adequacy of explanations employees receive about organizational procedures. Distributive justice and procedural justice are structural forms of justice originated from organization’s decisions and policies, whereas interpersonal justice and informational justice are social forms of justice originated from the daily interactions with immediate supervisors (Greenberg 1993a; Loi et al. 2009). Existing justice literature mostly explained the importance of organizational justice in terms of people’s desire to maximize their self-interests and people’s need for status and esteem in social groups (Skitka 2009). Cropanzano and Stein (2009) have warned that putting the focus on personal or social interests has moved justice research away from understanding individuals’ fundamental concerns on moral convictions and moral standards. It cannot be denied that people do care about justice because it touches on the basic respect for human dignity and worth (Folger 1998). In the workplace, fairness is a moral principle that sets things right, and people have the desire to be Bvirtuous actors in a just world^ (Cropanzano et al. 2001, p. 178). As explained later in this paper, the four types of justice are governed by different justice norms (Scott et al. 2009). Current research has also shown that these four types of justice influence the core work attitudes and behaviors of all organizational members (Colquitt et al. 2001, 2013). Thus, any type of unfair treatment in the workplace would upend the fundamental ethical principles of organizational members. In response to unfairness, they may engage in retributive responses toward the transgressor (Folger et al. 2005). Even worse, when people perceive unfairness in the workplace, they are less likely to adhere to ethical rules and tend to treat others less morally (Cropanzano and Stein 2009). Within the organization, the supervisor is a crucial member and assumes the leadership role nested within the hierarchical structure. He or she has the power and authority over the subordinates for leading them to accomplish organizational goals (Yukl 1999). At the same time, various organizational treatments, such as resources or rewards allocations, implementation of organizational procedures, interactions with his or her immediate superior or senior management, etc., can also directly affect the supervisor’s own fairness perceptions. The various types of injustice as perceived by supervisors have been shown to be related to subsequent abusive supervisory behavior in current research. For example, Tepper et al. (2006) found that supervisors’ perception of procedural injustice influences abusive supervision through supervisors’ depression. The studies of Aryee et al. (2007) and Rafferty et al. (2010) showed that supervisors’ interactional form of injustice is related to their abusive supervision. The empirical results of Hoobler and Hu (2013) further found that supervisors’ perception of interactional injustice affects the extent of abusive supervision with supervisors’ negative affect as the mediating mechanism. Tepper (2007) suggested that abusive supervision as a result of injustice can be explained by displaced aggression. When supervisors experience unfairness, they will express their resentment against subordinates because retaliation against the provoking agents of injustice (usually the organization or the immediate superior of the supervisors) may evoke future mistreatment, whereas subordinates are safe targets to abuse under the power-dependent structure in

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the organizational hierarchy. Much of the research examining contextual antecedents of abusive supervision has been developed under this line of explanation (see Martinko et al. 2013 and Tepper 2007 for reviews). We consider that displaced aggression can partly explain why supervisors use subordinates as targets for retaliation. However, its use of supervisors’ affective responses to injustice as the explanatory mechanism has widely neglected supervisors’ cognitions on the moral substance of injustice and abusive supervision. In particular, the supervisor is the moral agent of the organization (Wright 2013) who is expected to set the moral tone and act as the moral example for the subordinates to follow (Rhode 2006). Engaging in abusive supervision means that supervisors choose to violate their assumed moral mandate within the organization, and such violation could be originated from the supervisors’ concern of morality within the organization. Research has indicated that individuals with high concern of morality are more likely to behave ethically at work when being treated with fairness. However, when people perceive unfairness, they would feel that morality within the workplace has been infringed. Unfairness represents the breach of people’s fundamental moral conviction, i.e., the respect for human dignity and worth. Because of unfairness, people are more likely to perform deviant behaviors (Skitka 2009). Thus, we expect that any unfairness experienced by the supervisors (i.e., distributive, procedural, interpersonal, or informational) would lead them to question the moral standards within the organization. In other words, when unfairness is perceived by the supervisors, they should experience the sense of moral unease. As a result, they may become less compliance with the ethical conduct in the workplace and engage in unethical behaviors such as abusive supervision. Therefore, we propose the following proposition. Proposition 1 Supervisors’ perceptions of organizational injustice (distributive, procedural, interpersonal, or informational) are positively related to their subsequent abusive supervision. As supervisors play the role of the moral agent of the organization, they may experience cognitive dissonance when performing unethical supervisory behaviors. We propose moral disengagement as the crucial mechanism which allows them to inhibit moral self-regulation and rationalize their abusive actions as a result of various types of injustice. Moral disengagement and abusive supervision According to social cognitive theory of moral thought and action (Bandura 1986), moral standards serve as the guides and deterrents for human actions. People tend to do things that generate self-worth and refrain from doing things that violate the moral standards because these behaviors will bring self-censure (Bandura et al. 1996). The ongoing exercises of self-sanctions regulate people’s moral conduct. However, there are several psychological maneuvers by which moral self-sanctions can be selectively disengaged from harmful conduct (Bandura 1999). These mechanisms of moral disengagement allow people to perpetrate harmful acts while maintaining a positive selfimage (Aquino et al. 2007; Liu et al. 2012a). Social cognitive theory specifies eight mechanisms of moral disengagement which center on four broad sets of maneuvers

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(Bandura 1999; Bandura et al. 1996, 2001). We explain below how they relate to abusive supervision. The first set of moral disengagement mechanisms operates on cognitive reconstrual of behavior so that it is not viewed as immoral. These mechanisms include moral justification, the use of euphemistic language, and advantageous comparison. By using moral justification, people portray pernicious conduct as socially worthy or morally acceptable. Typically, abusive supervisory behaviors are usually reframed by supervisors as actions aiming at stimulating subordinates’ potentials for attaining organizational goals (Tepper 2007). Moreover, people use euphemistic language to describe harmful conduct in a more neutral way in order to make it benign or acceptable. It is not uncommon for supervisors to term abusive behaviors as actions of Bcoaching^ or Beducation^. For advantageous comparison, people make their harmful conduct look good by contrasting it with more reprehensive actions. For example, when compared with workplace violence such as physical assaults, abusive supervision can be said to cause less harm. All the three mechanisms revolve around the cognitive transformation of detrimental conduct into good conduct. In the workplace, supervisors are likely to use these mechanisms since subordinates may attribute abusive supervision to supervisors’ motive for performance promotion (Liu et al. 2012b). By reconstruing abusive supervision as morally right, abusive supervisors would have less self-censure. The second set of moral disengagement practices centers on obscuring or distorting the responsibility of harm-doers, which include displacement of responsibility and diffusion of responsibility. Displacement of responsibility is achieved when people view the harmful conduct stemming from the dictates of authority rather than the actor, while diffusion of responsibility is made possible when people view the harmful conduct is the end result of a collective decision. These two moral disengagement practices are particularly relevant to organizational settings where the responsibility for harmful outcomes can be displaced or diffused to organizational policies or procedures (Bandura 2002). Tepper (2000) suggested that abusive supervision may not be considered as deviant behavior when it conforms to an organization’s policies and norms. This is especially the case when the subordinates blame the organization for not disciplining the abuse. Lee and Elkins (2013) further contended that when subordinates attribute the abuse to the organization, they may tend to forgive their supervisors. When the organization is held responsible for the abusive behaviors, abusive supervisors may feel that they are not personally accountable for their wrongdoings. The third set of disengagement mechanisms involves minimizing, disregarding, or distorting the consequences of the harmful conduct. When the suffering of the harmful conduct is not easily visible or can be easily ignored, it is less likely for self-censure to happen. Research (e.g., Harvey et al. 2007; Tepper et al. 2007) shows that, when experiencing abusive supervision, subordinates tend to strategically use avoidant coping or ingratiation to neutralize the negative impacts of abusive supervision. These strategies may encourage the supervisors to neglect or ignore their harm-doings, which lead to subsequent or continuous abuse. The final set of moral disengagement practices operates on the recipients of the harmful conduct, which includes dehumanization and attribution of blame. Dehumanization usually happens when the harm-doers have power over the others or the victims are considered as out-group members (Bandura 1999). When the victims are divested of human qualities, harm-doers would sense less self-censure. Using attribution of

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blame, the harm-doers further believe that it is the victims’ own fault to cause the suffering. Evidence of these disengagement practices can be found in research showing that abusive supervisors choose to abuse subordinates who are dissimilar (i.e., dehumanization) or low performers (i.e., attribution of blame) (Tepper et al. 2011). The mediating role of moral disengagement Thus far, we propose that supervisors may engage in abusive supervision because their perceptions of unfairness trigger them to have less compliance with the ethical code in the workplace. We also describe how moral disengagement can make supervisors perform abusive supervision without self-censure. Research in organizational justice has illustrated that there are various justice rules applied to different types of justice which act as the normative standards for people to make fairness judgment (Scott et al. 2009). When the organization or its agent does not act in accordance with these rules, employees would perceive unfairness and react in negative ways such as hostility and moral outrage (Folger 2001). We expect that injustice may arouse the supervisors to downplay the importance of moral conduct and disengage in moral self-regulation, which in turn, leads to abusive supervision. When supervisors perceive more injustice, their disengagement in moral self-regulation would be more intense. In the followings, we explain how this process happens in response to each type of injustice. Distributive justice is generated from organizational decisions in relation to outcome allocations. Equity is the usual justice norm applied for this type of justice (Scott et al. 2009), and the fairness perception is usually arrived after social comparison (Greenberg 2007). Specifically, Adams’s (1965) equity theory postulates that perceptions of justice or injustice arise when one compares his or her ratio of outcomes/inputs to the corresponding ratio of a referent. Unequal ratios imply inequity which can arouse moral unease as the distributive norm of justice has been violated. The sense of moral violation may become more severe when people use Bwhat ought to be^ (Shepelak and Alwin 1986, p. 32) as a comparative standard. The desire to cause harm or to retaliate is a likely consequence of distributive injustice (Skarlicki and Folger 1997). We contend that the experiences of unfairness in outcome allocations make the supervisors morally disengage in self-sanction. In particular, as the nature of distributive justice emphasizes outcome comparison, the supervisors would attend to the mechanisms of advantageous comparison and attribution of blame in the process of moral disengagement. When encountering difficulties, people usually claim that their situations are worse than others (Moore 2007). Thus, advantageous comparison may generate a Bcognitive contrast effect^ (Aquino et al. 2007, p. 386) that convinces the supervisors to believe that the distributive unfair treatments they received from the organization are always worse than the way they treat their subordinates. In addition, as supervisors are more likely to commit fundamental attribution bias (Scott et al. 2009), they tend to over-attribute blames to subordinates and believe that the subordinates are deserved to receive abusive supervisory treatment because of their low performance. Therefore, the following propositions are put forward: Proposition 2a The mechanism of advantageous comparison mediates the relationship between supervisors’ perception of distributive injustice and abusive supervision.

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Proposition 2b The mechanism of attribution of blame mediates the relationship between supervisors’ perception of distributive injustice and abusive supervision. Research on procedural justice emphasizes the presence of organizational procedures to enhance fairness (Konovsky 2000). In general, formal procedures tend to be established by the organization or the top management (Cropanzano et al. 2002), and it is complex and time-consuming for the organization to change formal procedures (Cropanzano and Byrne 2001). Leventhal (1980) identified six basic rules for fair procedures: consistency, bias-suppression, accuracy, correctability, representativeness, and ethicality. According to the rule of ethicality, organization’s procedures need to be consistent with the fundamental moral and ethical values held by organizational members. Thus, unfairness in organizational procedures as perceived by the supervisors should create a sense of moral violation and a desire to retaliate by mean of causing harm to the organization (Skarlicki and Folger 1997; Tepper et al. 2006). We propose that procedural injustice makes supervisors disengage in moral selfregulation with displacement of responsibility and diffusion of responsibility as two core mechanisms. As unfair formal procedures are set by the organization and upper management, it gives an impression to the supervisors that the organization can condone unethical conduct, and the supervisors themselves can be less personally accountable for any unethical behavior they perform. They tend to believe that, without fair procedures, abusive supervision can be tolerated and will not be disciplined, and the subordinates would hold blame to the organization for the consequences of these actions (Tepper 2008). Furthermore, as organizational procedures are usually not decided by a person but a collective, personal accountability for procedural unfairness is rare. When procedures are not fair, the supervisors may expect that other organizational members will not follow the ethical code of the organization. Such context of collective instrumentality facilitates them to diffuse the responsibility of their abusive actions to other actors or the organization. Proposition 3a The mechanism of displacement of responsibility mediates the relationship between supervisors’ perception of procedural injustice and abusive supervision. Proposition 3b The mechanism of diffusion of responsibility mediates the relationship between supervisors’ perception of procedural injustice and abusive supervision. Interpersonal justice emphasizes the respect and propriety employees should receive during the interactions with their superiors (Colquitt 2001). Patient and Skarlicki (2005) suggested that behaviors related to interpersonal injustice, such as deception and badmouthing (Bies 2001), have undermined the universal moral principles. Bell and Khoury (2011) further proposed that interpersonal injustice can influence employee dehumanization, referring to employees’ feelings of being objectified by the organization, denied personal subjectivity, and made to feel like a tool or instrument for the organization’s end. In sum, interpersonal justice touches on human’s basic right Bto be treated with respect^ (Bies 2001, p. 110). We expect that any unfair interpersonal treatments received by the supervisors may drive their attention to the impersonal attributes under the workplace hierarchical chains

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of commands. Interpersonal injustice reminds the supervisors that unfriendliness and impoliteness are part of the expressions of an authority figure (Tepper 2000). Among the various mechanisms of moral disengagement, dehumanizing the victims and distorting the harmful consequences are the two practices that make use of the bureaucratization of the organization and the impersonalization of the chain of commands to weaken the self-deterring reactions of harmful acts (Bandura 1990). Bureaucratization leads people to relate in an impersonal way. The supervisors can further use their position authority to foster dehumanization (Bandura 1990). They categorize themselves as superior group and subordinates as inferior group. By divesting subordinates of human qualities or estranging subordinates as out-group members, abusive supervisors can conduct mistreatment and punitive actions with less burden of personal distress. Moreover, they can distort or ignore the harm of abusive supervision because, in the context of hierarchical chains of command, subordinates are likely to adopt avoidant coping strategies when they are abused (Tepper et al. 2007). The supervisors may also distort or minimize the harmful consequence of their abusive supervision by emphasizing that the behavior is nothing personal but focuses on subordinates’ tasks, thus removing themselves farther away from the consequences of the abuse they created. Proposition 4a The mechanism of distorting the consequences mediates the relationship between supervisors’ perception of interpersonal injustice and abusive supervision. Proposition 4b The mechanism of dehumanization mediates the relationship between supervisors’ perception of interpersonal injustice and abusive supervision. Informational justice can be perceived when explanations on procedures and outcomes are provided to the employees. The norms governing this type of justice are the adequacy and candidness of explanations that the employees received in the course of communication with their superiors (Scott et al. 2009). Much research (e.g., Greenberg 1993b; Shapiro 1991) has shown that inadequate explanations can make employees interpret an organizational event or decision as unfair. On the contrary, explanations that are honest and credible can enhance perceived fairness (Bobocel and Zdaniuk 2005). This is especially the case when organizations and managers need to deal with morally charged events or decisions, and informational justice is important to counteract a presumed ethical violation (Shaw et al. 2003). We suggest that the nature of informational injustice should arouse the abusive supervisors to select the mechanisms of moral justification and euphemistic language to justify their actions. They may receive inadequate, vague, or incredible explanations (e.g., confidentiality, strategic directions, etc.) from their immediate superiors on organizational decisions. Such treatments direct the supervisors’ attention to make use of justifications and sanitizing language to reconstruct their harmful behaviors. Moral justification makes others believe that abusive supervision is something personally and socially acceptable and is performed based on socially or morally worthy purposes (Bandura 2002). One typical moral justification is to tell the subordinates and others that abusive treatments are the means which help the organization achieve its ultimate goals. The use of euphemistic language can further shape people’s thought on interpreting abusive actions as not detrimental. It sounds morally acceptable that the

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abusive treatments are indeed Beducating^ or Bcoaching^ the subordinates to achieve organizational goals. Thus, these two mechanisms help the supervisors escape from moral control. Proposition 5a The mechanism of moral justification mediates the relationship between supervisors’ perception of informational injustice and abusive supervision. Proposition 5b The mechanism of euphemistic language mediates the relationship between supervisors’ perception of informational injustice and abusive supervision.

Discussion Injustice and abusive supervision are two workplace unethical phenomena which have attracted much research attention. Interestingly, scant research has examined the relationship between the two using a moral perspective. This article aims to fill this gap, and our proposed conceptual model illustrates how the various types of injustice can trigger relevant moral disengagement mechanisms, which in turn lead to supervisors’ subsequent abusive supervision. Several theoretical and practical implications of our conceptual model are worthy of further discussion. Theoretical implications Past research effort on organizational justice and abusive supervision (e.g., Tepper 2000) mainly concentrated on examining the negative impacts of abusive supervision on various types of justice perceptions of the subordinates. Kulik (2011) has encouraged more research on studying organizational justice from the perspective of the organizational agents. This paper responds to this call and enriches the existing limited literature examining the justice perceptions of the supervisors (e.g., Aryee et al. 2007; Tepper et al. 2006). In particular, we employ the moral perspective of organizational justice to explain why and how the supervisors would conduct unethical abusive behaviors. The moral perspective emphasizes that people take fairness as an end rather than a mean (Cropanzano and Stein 2009). Fairness is a moral standard that provides people with a sense of purpose and personal significance (Cropanzano et al. 2001). We believe that investigating supervisors’ injustice perceptions from the moral perspective is a natural and appropriate approach to understand their abusive behaviors. As the supervisors have assumed the role of moral agent within the organization and are expected to execute justice, their own perceptions of unfairness should have a strong influence on their internalized standards and convictions regarding morality, which impacts their subsequent supervisory behaviors. Much of the research on studying injustice as the antecedent of abusive supervision focuses on one type of injustice (e.g., Aryee et al. 2007; Hoobler and Hu 2013), and also relies solely on the affective response to injustice to explain abusive supervision (e.g., Hoobler and Hu 2013; Tepper et al. 2006). Despite Tepper’s (2007) call for investigating the causes of abusive supervision from the cognitive perspective, a recent qualitative review of abusive supervision literature by Martinko et al. (2013) reveals

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that the development on this research is still limited. This paper extends this line of enquiry. We take a more comprehensive approach to include all four types of organizational fairness in one conceptual model, and employ social cognitive theory (Bandura 1986) as the theoretical base to build up the cognitive linkup between injustice and abusive supervision. The supervisors play the role to demonstrate and maintain the moral standards of the organization (Rhode 2006), and abusive supervision is characterized by its sustained display of nonphysical hostility (Tepper 2007). To sustain abusive supervision, the supervisors need to go through a cognitive process that facilitates them to suppress their moral self-regulation and rationalize their unethical performance. With its wide application on explaining military and political violence (e.g., Aquino et al. 2007; Bandura 2002) and workplace deviance (e.g., Barsky 2011), moral disengagement provides meaningful account to the occurrence of continued abusive supervisory behaviors by highlighting supervisors’ concern of morality. Our work also complements the theoretical work of displaced aggression using affective mechanism as the sole focus. Another noticeable feature of our conceptual model is the differentiation of the unique effect of each type of injustice on moral disengagement. Justice researchers (e.g., Colquitt 2001; Greenberg 1993a; Loi et al. 2009) have emphasized the multidimensional nature of organizational justice. Empirical evidence on the relationship between each type of justice and a broad range of individuals’ attitudes and behavior has been demonstrated (Colquitt et al. 2001, 2013). We follow this stream of research and propose that the violation of the normative rule of each type of justice as perceived by the supervisors should direct their attention to different moral disengagement mechanisms. Specifically, we draw researchers’ attention on how the supervisors may select the types of disengagement mechanisms which are relevant to the nature of a particular type of unfair treatment. The supervisors’ perception of distributive injustice triggers their utilizing advantageous comparison and attribution of blame tactics. Their perception of procedural injustice prompts them to obscure personal accountability by displacing and diffusing the responsibility to the organization. Moreover, the supervisors’ interpersonal injustice assessment induces their adoption of dehumanization and distorting consequences maneuvers, and their informational injustice experience further directs their attention to the employment of moral justification and euphemistic language devices. By doing so, we develop a clear and thorough theoretical model to comprehend the cognitive mechanism leading to abusive supervision. Our work also extends the previous research on moral disengagement which usually conceptualizes moral disengagement as a single overarching construct (e.g., Bandura et al. 1996; Duffy et al. 2012). Practical implications In addition to the above theoretical implications, our conceptual model, if receives empirical support, should offer insights to organization and top management to deal with abusive supervision. It indicates the importance to maintain supervisors’ fair perceptions generated from all sources because any form of injustice can activate their moral disengagement mechanisms. As distributive justice and procedural justice belong to the structural forms of justice with the focus of the organization as a whole (Greenberg 1993a), organizations should ensure the provision of fair distribution of

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rewards and resources to their supervisors. Formal procedures should be tightly set up and closely enforced in order to preclude the supervisors’ misconception that unethical behavior can be tolerated under organizational rules and policies. Furthermore, organization should realize that interpersonal sensitivity and the sufficient flow of credible information are equally important for supervisors. Since the evaluations of interpersonal justice and informational justice are independent of the features of outcomes and procedures and may exhibit high variability across time (Loi et al. 2009), organizations should sustain these two forms of justice through frequent and regular meetings with their supervisors. Furthermore, our model carries important implications to the top echelon of the organization’s management. Since the supervisors’ abusive behaviors are influenced by their perceived fairness which can be originated from the top level of the organization’s hierarchy, the top management team should be mindful about maintaining middle-level managers’ fair perceptions through outcome allocation, procedures implementation, and interpersonal communications. By doing so, the negative impact of organizational unfairness would not trickle down to the lower levels of the organization. Organizations can also strengthen the moral awareness of their supervisors by providing leadership training programs that emphasize moral reasoning and moral identity (Brown and Treviño 2006). The importance of ethics and integrity should be clearly delivered to the supervisors during these trainings. The reinforcement of moral awareness and the cultivation of ethical culture within the organization can make supervisors’ activation of moral disengagement mechanisms less likely. Suggestions for future research This theoretical paper opens up several avenues for future research. We strongly recommend future research to empirically test our conceptual model in the organizational context. As our conceptual model is by nature a mediating process model, we recommend future field studies to be structured in a longitudinal design. Experiments manipulating the effects of injustice, moral disengagement, and abusive supervision are also useful to show evidence on the causal sequences among these variables. Future research may use our conceptual framework to investigate the possible impact of supervisors’ injustice on other unethical supervisory behavior such as workplace victimization and supervisor aggression (see Tepper (2007) for their differences with abusive supervision). Moreover, as there has been continuous research evidence on the trickle-down effect of supervisory attitudes and behaviors (e.g., Mayer et al. 2009), researchers may extend our model to investigate whether moral disengagement would mediate the trickle-down effect of abusive supervision (Liu et al. 2012b) and other supervisory unethical behaviors. Bandura (2002) expressed that social environment may create conditions conducive to moral disengagement. One possible condition may be the ethical climate of the organization which arises when organizational members believe that certain forms of ethical reasoning or behavior are expected standards or norms for decision-making within the organization (Cullen et al. 2003). Literature has generally identified five types of ethical climate: instrumental, caring, independence, law and code, and rules (Victor and Cullen 1988). Future research may examine how the various types of ethical climate influence our proposed conceptual model. For example, a caring

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climate, which emphasizes the overarching concern for the well-being of others, may attenuate the indirect effect of injustice on abusive supervision via moral disengagement. An instrumental climate which emphasizes egoism and self-interest will particularly accentuate our proposed indirect effect. Furthermore, climates emphasizing rules and codes of conduct may make moral disengagement more observable. Examining our theoretical model in a cross-cultural context is another promising research direction. The recent meta-analytical review by Shao et al. (2013) showed that the impact of injustice perceptions can be contingent on the cultural values of the respondents. Tepper (2007) also proposed that there may be variations on the perceptions of abusive supervision across cultures. Accordingly, future research may test the generalizability of our model in different cultural contexts. Furthermore, our conceptual model can be expanded by incorporating the possible moderating effects of the supervisors’ cultural values as well as the subordinates’. Last but not the least, researchers could enrich our framework by considering what kind of subordinates are more likely to trigger supervisors’ abuse when the supervisors are experiencing unfair treatment through the theoretical underpinning of victimization (Aquino and Lamertz 2004). In addition, it would also be theoretically meaningful to know when the supervisors may retaliate directly against the sources of their injustice experiences (e.g., employers or higher-level managers) or redirect their harm-doing towards other targets besides subordinates (e.g., customers). For example, it is logical to expect under situations when the supervisors are less power dependent on their employers or higher-level managers (e.g., they possess scarce expert knowledge), they are more likely to directly hit back the sources of their unfair treatment. Moreover, in the service industry, the supervisors may also abuse customers in the form like ridiculing and making negative comments on customers to others (Greenbaum et al. in press). This may be particularly the case when these customers are one-time consumers or contribute little to the overall sales volume.

Conclusion Our conceptual model enriches the current literature on organizational justice and abusive supervision. We contend that supervisors’ perceptions of different types of injustice would activate their adoptions of relevant moral disengagement mechanisms, which enable the supervisors to engage in abusive conduct without self-censure. We believe fruitful empirical progress could be made based on the theoretical linkages we establish in our model. We also hope our theoretical work can stimulate more scholarly efforts to study organizational injustice and unethical workplace behaviors through the lens of morality.

References Adams, J. S. (1965). Inequity in social exchange. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 267–299). New York: Academic. Aquino, K., & Lamertz, K. (2004). A relational model of workplace victimization: social roles and patterns of victimization in dyadic relationships. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(6), 1023–1034.

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