"With a Little Help from My Friends: Abusive Supervision, Team Member Exchange, and Creativity"

This study tests a set of novel theoretical predictions about whether and when team member exchange (TMX) can buffer the negative effects of abusive supervisor-employee relationships on creative outcomes in teams. To do this, we introduce the concept of abusive supervision differentiation and capture the variation in abusive supervisor-employee relationships within teams. Drawing from resource conservation theory and social exchange theory, we suggest that when there is both high mean and high variation of abusive supervision within a team, high levels of TMX can lead to lower creativity because of depletion of limited socio-emotional resources, as well as fights over those types of limited resources. We also predict that when abusive supervision differentiation is high, low TMX is likely to help overcome and even reverse the negative effects of high mean abusive supervision on creativity in teams. Multilevel analyses of time-lagged data of 469 employees in 65 teams in a Chinese company provide support fo...