Effects of Supervisor-Directed
Deviance on Retaliation against Subordinates
The COVID-19 pandemic is a global disruptive event, bringing about unprecedented
challenges to organisations. Thus, it represents a major contextual shift for working individuals
(e.g., Min et al., 2021) by reshaping workplace norms and norm-violating behaviours (Packer,
Ungson, and Marsh, 2021), including supervisor-directed deviance. Supervisor-directed
deviance is defined as a subordinate’s efforts to harm the supervisor through deliberate
behaviours such as acting rudely (Mitchell and Ambrose, 2007), which could translate into
massive costs for organisations (Tepper et al., 2009; Thau and Mitchell, 2010). Because of its
organisational impact, this phenomenon is receiving increasing scholarly attention. However,
thus far, previous investigations on supervisor-directed deviance have been context-free (e.g.,
Restubog et al., 2011) and positioned it as the subordinate’s retaliatory reaction to poor
leadership (Decoster et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2010) while ignoring the perspective of the
supervisor as a victim (Camps et al., 2018; Martinko et al., 2013).
Research shows that victims of personal offence are more likely to seek revenge when
the offender’s status is lower than their own (Aquino et al., 2006). Thus, the extant literature’s
omission of the supervisors’ perspective is surprising, given that they can easily retaliate against
deviant subordinates by exercising punitive power. Therefore, some scholars have argued for
potentially reverse causation, proposing that a subordinate’s deviant behaviour causes rather
than stems from deviant behaviour by the supervisor (Martinko et al., 2013). Scarce evidence
also hints at the possibility of supervisors’ retaliation, showing that follower hostility and
deviance could elicit abusive supervision (Camps et al., 2018; Mawritz et al, 2017) and prompt
supervisors to respond to subordinates’ deviance with reverse deviance (see Jenkins et al.,
2012). However, because of the cross-sectional or time-lagged nature of these studies, the
direction of this relationship and the perspective of the supervisor as a target of deviance
remains unexplored. Filling these gaps, this study aims to examine whether and how supervisor-
directed deviance leads to retaliatory behaviour by the supervisors while investigating the role of
the pandemic in this relationship. In doing so, we make several contributions to the supervisor-
directed deviance literature. First, drawing on the affective events theory (AET; Weiss and Beal,
2005; Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996), we treat supervisor-directed deviance as a negative
affective workplace event that elicits retaliation as a negative behavioural response. Using an
experimental approach, we respond to calls for research on subordinate deviance being the cause
rather than the result of supervisors’ behaviours (Camps et al., 2018; Martinko et al., 2013). We
additionally examine a wide range of real-life retaliatory responses that include career penalties
(Mitchell and Ambrose, 2007) along with subordinate-directed deviance.
Second, we develop a model suggesting that felt leader identity threat is an important
underlying mechanism in the relationship between supervisor-directed deviance and retaliation.
Consistent with identity research (DeRue and Ashford, 2010; Petriglieri, 2011), we propose that the
affective nature of supervisor-directed deviance threatens the enactment of leader identity, which
consequently elicits retaliation against the perceived source of threat. Established retaliation
literature (see review by Jackson et al., 2019) has predominantly concentrated on revenge
cognitions (Liu et al., 2010; Restubog et al., 2015) and anger as underlying mechanisms (e.g., Wang
et al., 2018) of the wrongdoing-retaliation link. Extending these endeavours, we introduce a new
pathway through which supervisor-directed deviance can potentially lead to supervisor retaliation,
responding to calls for research investigating subordinates as a source of supervisors’ identity
threat (Aquino and Douglas, 2003).
Third, to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first of its kind to consider COVID-
19 pandemic as a crucial contextual factor influencing supervisors’ reactions against
subordinates who engage in deviant behaviour while predicting its effects during its
progression. In so doing, we conceptualise supervisor-directed deviance and the COVID-19
pandemic as workplace and exogenous affective events, respectively, whose effects interact to
shape the supervisors’ affective and behavioural responses. Thus, we extend the existing
deviance research grounded on AET (e.g., Harvey, Martinko and Borkowski, 2017) and respond
to calls for research specifying and measuring the context in which affective events (i.e.,
supervisor-directed deviance; Weiss and Beal, 2005), and retaliation (Jackson et al., 2019;
Restubog et al., 2011) occur.
Finally, we test our hypothesised model with two quasi-experiments with naturally
occurring conditions, by respectively using a pre–post and a Wave 1–Wave 3 pandemic study
design. Such a design has been rarely used in management and leadership research despite its
ecological validity (Podsakoff and Podsakoff, 2019; Sieweke and Santoni, 2020). By
combining these experiments with an observational study, our methodology offers a unique
opportunity to understand the nature of retaliatory responses before and during the pandemic
and test causal relationships while enhancing external validity (Sieweke and Santoni, 2020).
Thus, we consider our design a methodological strength of our work.
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