Top-Down Abuse in the Workplace: A Systematic Review of Terminology and Impact in Academic Literature
Date
2019-03-20
Authors
Albano, Brier
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Abstract
Academic focus on top-down abuse in the workplace has increased while society has
shown tremendous interest in the topic matter as abusive leaders of large organizations are
highlighted in popular media. Through a systematic review, this project focused on 55 studies,
and evidence in 127 academic articles to discover that at present, there is no consistency in the
academic definitions of top-down workplace abuse that can encompass abuse as it presents
through different levels and impact radiuses of a workplace. This project proposes a framework
for top-down abuse terminology that recognizes the differentiation between top-down abuse in
the workplace terms like, leadership and behaviour, and the scope-impact (defined as impact
through which the overall scope of the consequence is a critical factor) bear consequence on the
differences of this abuse. The project calls for Destructive Organizational Leadership,
Destructive Leadership and Abusive Leadership to be used in reference to the scope-impact of
top-down abuse in the workplace and further, calls for behaviour to be used more frequently to
support a more consistent methodology in future empirical studies. Additionally, this project
recommends three areas of future study including: (1) a broad-analysis of leadership behaviours,
(2) the creation of a model for measuring scope-impact, and (3) testing of a variety of
organizational-level modifiers.
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Keywords
abusive leadership, destructive leadership, organizational leadership, abusive supervision, destructive organizational leadership, top-down workplace abuse