Zhenyu Liao

• PhD
• Northeastern University

Research on abusive supervision has predominantly focused on the consequences for victims while overlooking how leaders respond to their own abusive behavior. Drawing from the literature on moral cleansing, we posit that supervisors who engage in abusive behavior may paradoxically engage in more constructive leadership behaviors subsequently as a r...

The traditional “great man” approaches to leadership emphasize qualities of individual leaders for leadership success. In contrast, a rapidly growing body of research has started to examine shared leadership, which is broadly defined as an emergent team phenomenon whereby leadership roles and influence are distributed among team members. Despite th...

Research on leader–member exchange (LMX) has predominantly taken a dyadic relationship perspective to understand the differences in overall exchanges across leader–member dyads, while neglecting the within-dyad exchange dynamics across a series of episodic resource transactions. Drawing from the literature on equity and reciprocity principles of so...

To hedge unforeseen risk, investors may seek to fund male-led ventures that they anticipate most other investors will prefer, arriving at decisions biased against women. Yet, little is known about how investors infer such gendered preferences and when they are particularly likely to do so. Integrating insights from third-party bias research with so...

Social exchange- and social identity-based mechanisms have been commonly juxtaposed as two pivotal proxies of the relational approach for studying organizational justice. Despite their distinct theoretical roots, less is known about whether and how these two proximal mechanisms complement one another in accounting for justice effects on key outcome...

Contrary to the traditional belief that decision-making autonomy enhances employee well-being, we investigate the cognitive circumstances and mechanisms through which daily decision-making autonomy leads to mental fatigue. Integrating self-regulation theory with construal-level theory, we propose that daily decision-making autonomy triggers cogniti...

Although emerging actor-centric research has revealed that performing morally laden behaviors shapes how employees behave subsequently, less is known about what work behaviors may emerge following employees' unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB)-a unique behavior with competing moral connotations. We integrate the moral self-regulation litera...

Despite research suggesting that emotional interactions pervade daily resource exchanges between leaders and members, the leader–member exchange (LMX) literature has predominantly focused on the interplay between general affective experiences and the overall relationship quality. Drawing upon the affect theory of social exchange, we examine why and...

Research on unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) has predominantly focused on its antecedents while overlooking how engaging in such behavior might affect employees’ psychological experience and their downstream work behaviors. Integrating cognitive dissonance theory with the moral identity literature, we argue that engaging in UPB restricts...

While destructive consequences for subordinates have featured prominently in the abusive supervision literature, scholars have insinuated that supervisory abuse may temporarily yield functional results. Drawing from research on motive attribution tendencies that underlie abusive supervision and the control perspective of repetitive thought, we deve...

Workplace humor is ubiquitous, yet scholars know little about how it affects employees' behaviors in organizations. We draw on an emerging psychological theory of humor—benign violation theory—to suggest that a leader's sense of humor often conveys counter-normative social information in organizations. We integrate this theory with social informati...

While a plethora of studies have examined the relationships between abusive supervision and outcomes, there is a lack of a comprehensive and systematic framework that integrates the consequences and moderators of abusive supervision. We fill the void in the abusive supervision literature through conducting a quantitative review. Based on a meta-ana...

Although researchers have argued that employees often carefully examine social contexts before speaking up to leaders, the role of leaders' affective states has received little attention. The current research addresses this important issue from an emotion-associal-information perspective by exploring whether, why, and when leaders' affect influence...

Although large amount of studies have used social exchange theory to explain leader-member interactions and the relevant consequences in organizations, we know little about the specific process through which a leader and a member exchange resources with each other. Drawing on the affect theory of social exchange, we develop and test a leader-member...

While the outcomes of abusive supervision have received a lot of research attention, its antecedents are less well understood. Based on the interactionist principle of trait activation and research relating personality traits and organizational contexts to abusive supervision, we develop a multilevel model that explains how supervisor trait anger i...

Previous proactivity research has assumed that proactive personality facilitates positive environmental change and that proactive personality is a relatively stable personality trait which is prone to change. However, little research has examined impact of proactive personality on change in work environment longitudinally and whether work experienc...

Abusive supervision is a behavior embedded in multilevel contexts, which requires multilevel research on its antecedents. On the basis of trait activation theory, we leverage this article to extend the research on antecedents of abusive supervision: First, we identify the latent features of abusive supervision, on which we develop a conceptual mode...