Who do employees follow? An analysis of contrasting and compensatory effects between abusive supervisors in multiple team membership contexts.

Abstract

In today's competitive environment, followers are increasingly assigned to work on multiple teams simultaneously (i.e., multiple team membership), oftentimes led by multiple leaders. While existing scholarship suggests that a leader's positive behaviors can spill over to positively impact follower motivation and task performance in another team (led by another leader), we reveal that a leader's aversive behaviors (e.g., abusive supervision) on one team are associated with a cross-leader differentiation pattern in another team. Drawing on contrast-based perspectives, and building on reactive compensation research, we argue that abusive supervision by one leader is associated with more favorable evaluations of an alternative leader, particularly when the latter leader engages in lower levels of abusive supervision. Across two scenario-based experiments and a field study, we find consistent support for this pattern: Abusive supervision by one leader is positively related to satisfaction with another leader, which is in turn associated with performance in that leader's team. These findings contribute to the abusive supervision and multiple team membership literatures by showing how employees differentiate between leaders across teams, and we discuss implications for theory and practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).