What now? Defining capricious supervision and examining its impact on employee strain

Abstract

Despite frequent anecdotal accounts and media portrayals of unpredictable and/or inconsistent leaders, scholarly understanding of such leadership remains limited, mostly due to ambiguity surrounding its conceptualization and operationalization. Rather than focusing on employees’ direct experiences with unpredictable and inconsistent leaders, prior research has primarily measured changes in specific leader behavior over time or the interactive effects of seemingly opposing leader behaviors. Yet, this is not the same as perceiving that a leader has a consistently erratic style. Here, we conceptualize and systematically operationalize capricious supervision, defined as an employee’s perception of their leader’s frequent changes in decisions and treatment toward them. Across three studies with five employee samples, we develop a scale of capricious supervision (Study 1) and establish its discriminant and predictive validity by differentiating it from abusive supervision, justice variability (Study 2), and ambivalent leadership (Study 3) and examining its impact on employee outcomes (Study 3). Grounded in the stressor-strain model, we find that employees experiencing capricious supervision perceive their work as uncertain and frustrating, leading to emotional exhaustion, poor sleep quality, and counterproductive work behavior. Together, we provide a clear understanding of capricious supervision as a distinct leadership style, opening a conversation on its role in the workplace.