From Struggle to Strength: Coping with Abusive Supervision in Project Teams through Proactive Behavior and Team Building

While considerable attention has been devoted to positive leadership patterns in the realm of project management, the dark side of leadership has rarely been studied within project teams. To address this gap, we focus on abusive supervision in project teams and develop a team-level moderated mediation model to examine whether, how, and when abusive supervision influences project outcomes by drawing from the Proactive Motivation Theory. Survey data were collected from 132 project teams containing 132 project managers and 392 project members using a multi-source time-lagged survey design. Our findings reveal significant negative relationships between abusive supervision and both project performance and project team creativity. Furthermore, we found that a team’s proactive behavior plays a mediating role in these relationships. More importantly, our study identifies that team building mitigates the direct negative impact of abusive supervision on proactive behavior and the indirect effects of abusive supervision on project performance and project team creativity. These findings provide valuable theoretical and managerial implications for abusive supervision and project management scholars and practitioners.