MAKASSAR, Indonesia April 19 2026 /IOP/–You have just been publicly humiliated by your supervisor in a team meeting. The sarcasm was sharp, the dismissal deliberate. Now the question your mind immediately starts answering — whether you want it to or not — is: whose fault is this?
That question, it turns out, determines nearly everything about what happens next.
A study published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration (Taylor & Francis Group, October 2023), titled “Abusive supervision in public service organisations: investigating the moderating effect of attribution styles,” examines precisely this mechanism. Conducted by Abdul Kadir, Hillman Wirawan, Rudi Salam, Syahruddin Hattab, and Daswati Daswati, the study followed 329 employees across five types of Indonesian public service organisations: municipal offices, hospitals, police offices, social security offices, and schools. Using a three-wave longitudinal design, the researchers tracked abusive supervision, attribution styles, turnover intention, and individual work performance over time.
The core finding is deceptively simple but psychologically rich: abusive supervision harms performance, and it does so partly by planting the seed of wanting to quit. When employees experience sustained hostility from their leaders, their cognitive resources — the mental energy needed to plan, focus, and solve problems — are steadily drained. Some of that energy redirects toward fantasizing about exit. And employees who are mentally halfway out the door perform worse.
But the study’s real contribution lies one layer deeper: in how employees explain the abuse to themselves. The researchers measured three distinct attribution styles — self-directed (blaming yourself), supervisor-directed (blaming the boss), and organisation-directed (blaming the system) — and found that each creates a radically different outcome.
Employees who blamed themselves amplified the damage. Internalising the cause as stable and personal, they felt trapped and increasingly desperate to leave, which eroded performance further. Employees who blamed the organisation reached similar conclusions by a different route: if the whole system condones the abuse, the logical response is to find an exit, not fight the current. But employees who attributed abuse to the supervisor alone showed a striking pattern — their performance actually held up, or even improved. Knowing the source is one specific person, and that person can theoretically be appeased, these employees adopted a strategy of ingratiation: working harder, showing results, reducing friction. A short-term survival tactic that paradoxically keeps numbers up, even as it quietly corrodes their wellbeing.
This finding speaks directly to SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions. Public service organisations are not incidental settings — they are the machinery through which citizens receive healthcare, education, legal protection, and social security. When abusive supervision goes unaddressed inside these institutions, it does not merely harm individual employees. It degrades the quality of governance itself. Leaders who abuse subordinates drive talent out and reward appeasement over genuine competence. Institutions built on that dynamic cannot be strong, fair, or trustworthy.
The practical implication is urgent: public sector organisations need systematic early-warning mechanisms for abusive leadership — not just complaint channels that require employees to risk further retaliation, but structural audits of leadership culture that make accountability impossible to defer.
Reference:
Kadir, A., Wirawan, H., Salam, R., Hattab, S., & Daswati, D. (2023). Abusive supervision in public service organisations: investigating the moderating effect of attribution styles. Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration. https://doi.org/10.1080/23276665.2023.2274571
Contact:
Hillman Wirawan
hillman@unhas.ac.id
