Shandong U. of Science and Technology, Tai'an Campus
Integrating person-environment fit theory and collective-oriented leadership theory, the current research seeks to investigate how person-team congruence in agreeableness and conscientiousness affects abusive supervision and servant leadership, and the consequent task performance. In a sample of 707 employees from 102 teams across three waves, we conducted polynomial regression and response surface analysis to test the hypotheses. The results showed that both person-team congruence in agreeableness and person-team congruence in conscientiousness are positively related to servant leadership, person-team congruence in agreeableness is negatively related to abusive supervision, and person-team incongruence in agreeableness is positively related to abusive supervision whereas person-team incongruence in conscientiousness is negatively related to servant leadership. The current research deepens our understanding of how individual and team personality congruence influences how members are treated by their leaders and enriches our knowledge of which employees are more likely to be the targets of abusive supervision and servant leadership.