“You Wouldn’t Like Me When I’m Sleepy”: Leaders’ Sleep, Daily Abusive Supervision, and Work Unit Engagement

We examine the daily sleep of leaders as an antecedent to daily abusive supervisory behavior and work unit engagement. Drawing from ego depletion theory, our theoretical extension includes a serial mediation model of nightly sleep quantity and quality as predictors of abusive supervision. We argue that poor nightly sleep influences leaders to enact daily abusive behaviors via ego depletion, and these abusive behaviors ultimately result in decreased daily subordinate unit work engagement. We test this model through an experience sampling study spread over 10 workdays with data from both supervisors and their subordinates. Our study supports the role of the indirect effects of sleep quality (but not of sleep quantity) via leader ego depletion and daily abusive supervisor behavior on daily subordinate unit work engagement.