A growing body of research explains the causes of abusive supervision and the harm it brings to employees. But because abusive supervision can negatively impact firm performance, an open question is why it persists, often for extended periods of time. We posit that, in certain situations, there are two dimensions of supervisory quality, such that performance in one dimension compensates for poor performance in another dimension. A system of moral credit could thus keep an abusive supervisor in place for performance in one area while causing deleterious effects on employees and the organization. Leading scholars of abusive supervision have observed that sports present extreme cases of abuse. We, therefore, use college athletics as a business setting to examine how moral credit might explain the persistence of abusive supervision. A game theory model incorporates institutional details prior to recent rule changes. We find that NCAA rules constrained athletes’ choices, allowing colleges to prioritize coaches’ athletic performance over their abusiveness. Our study thus contributes an analytical framework for understanding and mitigating abusive supervision and identifies worker mobility as an issue more broadly beyond the sports setting. We also contribute to a growing body of literature that uses sports settings to analyze general business problems.
