Beyond the workplace: abusive supervision and employees' compulsive consumption behaviors

Although abusive supervision has been widely examined in relation to workplace outcomes, less is known about how it may spill over into employees' off-job consumption behaviors. Drawing on the process perspective of ego depletion theory, this study examines how and when abusive supervision is associated with two forms of compulsive consumption: compulsive buying and compulsive eating. We propose that abusive supervision contributes to ego depletion, conceptualized as a state of impaired self-regulatory functioning, characterized by reduced motivation to maintain restraint and heightened responsiveness to rewarding cues. Accordingly, we propose that abusive supervision increases employees' tendencies toward compulsive buying and compulsive eating by impairing their self-regulatory capacity through ego depletion. Furthermore, we examine pay satisfaction as a boundary condition influencing the extent to which ego depletion translates into compulsive consumption behaviors.

Using a three-wave survey design, we collected data from 445 full-time employees in China.

The results showed that abusive supervision was positively related to employees' compulsive buying and compulsive eating via ego depletion. Moreover, pay satisfaction positively moderated the relationship between ego depletion and compulsive buying, as well as the indirect effect of abusive supervision on compulsive buying via ego depletion. In contrast, the moderating effect of pay satisfaction on compulsive eating and the corresponding moderated mediation effect were not significant.

These findings offer an incremental extension of the abusive supervision literature by linking workplace mistreatment to employees' consumption-related self-regulatory failures, clarify the role of process-based ego depletion in explaining off-job spillover, and suggest that pay satisfaction may function as a behavior-specific boundary condition shaping employees' behavioral responses under conditions of impaired self-regulation.