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Index
Executive Summary....................................................................................................................................................1 Organisational Context ...............................................................................................................................................2 Social and Economic Contexts ...................................................................................................................................3 Theoretical Overview .................................................................................................................................................3 Methodology ..............................................................................................................................................................8 Data Sample ...........................................................................................................................................................8 Measures .................................................................................................................................................................9 Control Variables ...............................................................................................................................................9 Abusive Supervision (AS) ................................................................................................................................ 10 Ethical Leadership (EL) .................................................................................................................................. 10 Affective Commitment to the Supervisor (ACTS) ............................................................................................ 10 Job Security (JS) .............................................................................................................................................. 10 Error Management (EM) ................................................................................................................................. 10 Workgroup Conflict (WC) ............................................................................................................................... 11 In-Role Behaviour (IRB).................................................................................................................................. 11 Extra-Role Performance (ERP) ....................................................................................................................... 11 Voice (V) .......................................................................................................................................................... 11 Failure-Based Learning (FBL) ........................................................................................................................ 11 Results ......................................................................................................................................................................12 Discussion ................................................................................................................................................................14 Recommendations ....................................................................................................................................................17 Limitations................................................................................................................................................................19 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................................20 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................................................21 Appendix ..................................................................................................................................................................25

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Executive Summary
This report has the main objective of analysing the topic of abusive supervision in the call-center department of one of the main gas providers in Portugal. It has also the objective of analysing the relationship between employee and supervisor, in order to understand the company’s internal dynamics, while providing recommendations that can improve the department overall performance and, at some point, the company as a whole. To achieve this goal, our group collected data – in form of surveys - from this department and obtained a sample of four teams, each composed by ten employees and one supervisor. Reliability, correlations and ANOVA analysis were used to breakdown our data, turning it into useful information. This information showed strong and negative correlations between abusive supervision, extrarole performance, in-role behaviour, ethical leadership, and error management. Furthermore, surprisingly high means for job security and ethical leadership were also found, when relating them with the high levels of abusive supervision. A strong theoretical background supported by knowledgeable authors in the different discussion subjects, such as Bennett J. Tepper and Pedro Neves in the topic of abusive supervision, was used to back up our results on means and correlations of the variables included in our study. After getting exclusive inside views of the company’s procedures from a contact who works in the organization, several recommendations were made. The recommendations had the main purpose of decreasing the level of abusive supervision while focusing in boosting overall performance levels. In fact, it is expected, with the knowledge acquired from both theoretical background and information obtained from the data mining, that a decrease in the perceived levels of abusive supervision would enhance performance to higher levels, contributing positively to the organization’s profitability. For example, lower levels of abusive supervision could be achieved by an improvement in the employees’ levels of autonomy connected with an increase in the communication among employees. In this research, there were both statistical and contextual limitations. Statistical, because there is a small sample size, that limits the statistical power of the analysis; contextual, because our group had to deliver the surveys to both employees and supervisors during their lunch break, that resulted in the exclusion of some surveys due to lack of quality in the data.

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Organisational Context
The research was done in a Call-Center, part of a big gas providing company, in Lisbon. This company takes pride in its speed, efficiency and effectiveness when dealing with its customers’ problems, complaints and doubts. This company aims at excellence in the service it provides to its customers. There are four major areas of call-center in this department: one outbound service, two inbound services and one fast service line. Each team has ten employees and one supervisor. A few months ago, there was an increase in the number of team members; from eight to ten due to the end of procedures for new products, redistributing employees to already established teams. Administration and higher boards are on other floors, and they prefer communicate with the supervisors of this department by email. In order to schedule a meeting with higher boards, the employee first needs to communicate this intention to the supervisor. Then, an email is sent to the Human Resources Department by the supervisor requesting a meeting. Only after receiving a positive confirmation, the employee is able to communicate with higher boards. The company acknowledges that the employees are unsatisfied with their work conditions due to the results of previous internal surveys - it is of the company’s policy to do surveys regularly. “It is about the speed, and achieving each day’s goals. They need to log in into the system within ten minutes after arriving to the work room. If they do not do it, I have to deliver them a form for them to fill out about the reason why they were not logged in. If I do not deliver it, the blame is on me, and my superiors will discuss it with me”, said one supervisor. “The dyads can only be done at lunch break, because if my team members do not achieve their goals, they have to fill out a form, reporting the reasons”, she added. Another supervisor mentioned that is was hard to do his job, and supervise a team of ten, “If I do not do my work in the morning, and help them in the afternoon, it is impossible for me, to get my work done - I cannot do everything simultaneously.”

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Social and Economic Contexts
The turnover rate in call-centers was about 26%, in 2009, in all industry, according to Response Design Corporation, meaning that for each 100 employees, 26 employees leave within a year. However, the turnover rate of part-time employees is even higher, reaching 33% in 2009. Regarding Portugal, the unemployment rate has been increasing up to 16.2%, in 2013. In the same year, the unemployment rate between people who had only completed high school and had completed college was 17.4% and 12.6%, respectively - according to Pordata provided by Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos – Graph 1. in appendix. The ratio between the number of new firms and firms that were dissolved was 1.8 at 2013, against 2.9 in 2006 (data is also available in Pordata).

Theoretical Overview
Abusive supervision Abusive supervision can be interpreted as the “subordinates’ perceptions of the extent to which supervisors engage in the sustained display of hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviours, excluding physical contact” (Tepper, 2000, p. 178). Abusive supervision is subjective, because one individual can think that the supervisor is being abusive in one context and not on other contexts, and different individuals view the behaviour of the supervisor in different ways (Harvey et al., 2007). Manifestations of abusive supervision are: “public criticism, loud and angry tantrums, rudeness, inconsiderate actions and coercion” (Bies & Tripp, 1998; Bies, 2000). The utility of the employee, the conflict between him and the supervisor and the perceived dissimilarity in beliefs and goals can cause mistreatment (Hafer & Olson, 2003). When subordinates are perceived as low performers, they can be subject to abusive supervision, because they fit the victim profile - “annoying, aggravating and difficult to work with” (Olweus, 1978). Abusive supervision has an enduring quality - the employees who suffer from hostility of the supervisor continue the work relationship for four reasons: they are economically dependent of job; they are afraid of what could happen after quitting the job; they feel powerless about the abusive supervision

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or the supervision only mistreats her/him from time to time, and the employee has hope that the abusive behaviour of the supervisor will not happen again (Walker, 1979). In 1995, Opotow created the moral exclusion theory, in which perceived-deep dissimilarity increases the supervisor perception of conflict with the employee. Perceived-deep dissimilarity is negatively correlated with the performance evaluation of the employee perceived by the supervisor. When the supervisor engages in abusive behaviour, the employee will try to reciprocate, not openly, but in a way that will harm the organization, the supervisor and co-workers (Mitchell, & Ambrose, 2007; Tepper, Henlle, Lamber, Giacalone, & Duffy, 2008). The retaliation done by the employee will increase into a more open and direct way, increasing the hostility (Tepper et al., 2001). Most of the times, there is displaced aggression, in which the employee target someone who is innocent, when she/he cannot use aggression towards the agent of abusive supervision (Marcus-Newhall et al., 2000). As individuals perceive the wrong-doing of their supervisor, they will decrease the extra-role performance, diminishing discretionary actions such as, suggesting ideas or helping co-workers (Rafferty, & Restubog, 2011; Zellars, Tepper, & Duffy, 2002). According to Tepper (2000), “subordinates whose supervisors were more abusive reported higher turnover, less favourable attitudes towards job, life, and organization, greater conflict between work and family life, and greater psychological distress”. Abusive supervision is negatively correlated with affective organizational commitment (Tepper, Henle, Giacolone, & Duffy, 2008). In 1965, Levinson stated that the organization is represented by the supervisors, and that any type of treatment done by them is assumed to be from part of the organization. When employees perceive the supervisor as part of the organization, and when abusive supervision occurs, they assume that they are being mistreated by the organization (Shoss, 2013). Perceived organisational support, POS, are the set of “employees´ perception that their employing organisation cares about their well-being, values their contributions towards the organization's success, and in the future is likely to assist them if needed to continue their employment and to effectively manage their stress-related issues” (Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchinson & Sowa, 1986; Rhoades & Eisenberger, 2002). Thus, the implementation of perceived organisational support can lead to the increase of the “perception of procedural fairness, interactional justice and remuneration” (Rhoades & Eisenberger, 2002). Studies reveal that perceived organisational support is positively correlated with “organisational commitment, job satisfaction, positive mood at work, job involvement,
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in-role performance, extra-role performance towards the organisation, and desire to remain with the organisation” (Rhoades & Eisenberger, 2002).

Affective Commitment to the Supervisor Affective commitment to the supervisor can be defined as “an individual's identification with, involvement in the organization, and emotional attachment to, an organization” (Allen & Meyer, 1990; Meyer & Allen, 1991, 1997). If the employee perceives that the organisation cares about her/him, she/he will feel an obligation to contribute to in the organization´s goals, based on the reciprocity norm (Gouldner, 1969).

Workgroup Conflict Workgroup conflict is defined as “perceived incompatibilities by the parties involved, and it will always be present in organizational life, between co-workers or workgroup members and between employee and supervisor” (Boulding, 1962). Between co-worker, task conflicts may be good because they can lead to an increase in performance (Jehn, 1995) or decision making quality (Amason, 1996). But in conflicts between employee and supervisor, the supervisor will probably perceive the conflict as a relationship conflict. He may think that the employee is criticizing or challenging him, and this is difficult to accept for the supervisor, as he thinks that he is expected to have more knowledge and experience (Tsui, Xin & Egan, 1995). Supervisors will see any conflict with an employee as a personal attack, an insult to their position (Xin & Pelled, 2003).

Error Management According to Fresse (1995), “human errors per se can never be completely prevented, and, therefore, it is necessary to ask the question of what can be done after an error has occurred”. While error aversion is the action of preventing doing errors in order to avoid dealing with negative consequences, error management consists in dealing with the consequences, either positive or negative, and learning from them.

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With communication, individuals not only “learn by doing”, but are also able to learn from other people’s experiences. Thus, there is a reduction on negative consequences involving the action of making errors (Mathieu, Goodwin, Heffner, Salas, & Cannon-Bowers, 2000). Through open communication, it is possible to detect errors faster, decreasing their negative consequences (Reason, 1990). An error management culture can greatly improve overall product quality, service quality, and work procedures. Studies conducted by van Dyck, Frese et al. (2005), revealed that the performance of firms is positively correlated with an error management culture, and that an error management culture increases the profitability of firms - decreasing the cost of errors.

Ethical Leadership Brown et al. (2005) stated that ethical leadership was “the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships, and the promotion of such conduct to followers through two-way communication, reinforcement, and decision-making”. The “unethical” behaviours are the ones that individuals notice. When supervisors are being ethical, no employees notice, because it is expected that the supervisor has an ethical behaviour (Rousseau, 1995). An instance of abusive supervision will overshadow consistent and long-duration ethical leadership (Palanski, 2014). Ethical leadership is positively correlated with “leader consideration, interactional fairness, leader honesty and idealized influence” and negatively correlated with abusive supervision (Brown et al., 2005).

Job security Job security can be defined as an employee’s “expectations about continuity in a job situation” (Davy et al., 1997, cit. by Sverke et al, 2002). Studies conducted by Moss, Salzman, and Tilly (2008) stated that the high turnover rate of callcenters does not interfere in the choice of offering job to the most skilled workers - they choose the higher-performers candidates. As the call-centers are mainly focus on results, the employees who are high-performers feel secure about their job position.
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Individuals start to develop feeling and attachment to the organization where they work. According to Steers (1977), “individuals who perceived their organizations to be undependable in carrying out their commitments to employees were, in turn, less committed to their organizations”. Moreover, when workers feel job insecurity, they assume that they cannot do anything to alter the situation. Therefore, their performance will decrease (Greenhalgh, & Rosenblatt, 1984).

Behaviours Abusive supervision has a negative correlation with both employee´s task performance and extra-role performance, because workers who experience abusive supervision have “a low level of interactional and procedural justice (Aryee et al., 2007; Zellars, Tepper, & Duffy, 2002) and are motivated to restore their sense of control (Harris, Kacmar, & Zivnuska, 2007) by reducing their efforts at work” (Xu, Erica, Xu Huang, Catherine K. Lam, and Qing Miao, 2012).

Extra-role Performance When employees perceive the abusive supervision as a negative form of reciprocity, they will decrease the activities that are not directly related to their specific work - extra-role activities - (Zellars et al., 2002). Organ (1997) defended that “employees’ attitudes are more likely to be expressed in extra-role performance and actions over which employees have greater discretion”. Several researches lead to expect a negative correlation between abusive supervision and subordinates’ extra-role performance (Stefan Thau, Rebecca J. Bennett, Marie S. Mitchell, Mary Beth Marrs, 2009).

In-role Behaviour In the only study that has investigated the relationship between abusive supervision and job performance, Harris, Kacmar, and Zivnuska (2007) found that abusive supervision was negatively related to self-rated and leader-rated job performance.

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Voice The prosocial voice behaviour consists on “the expression of change-oriented comments with a motive to improve rather than just criticize a situation” (LePine and Van Dyne, 2001; Van Dyne, Ang and Botero, 2003). This type of behaviour is critical to the organization’s performance (Detert and Burris, 2007), because decision-making should not depend only on top management. However, when subordinates express their change-oriented comments, they are taking personal risk for the firm (Van Dyne, Ang and Botero, 2003). Empirical studies also found that there is a negative relationship between abusive supervision and interactional justice, as employees who work with an abusive supervisor feel low levels of interactional levels, because the treatment they receive violates moral and social principles/rules - for example when the supervisor humiliates an individual in front of the team. This negative relationship translates into an indirect negative relationship between abusive supervision and supervisor-reported prosocial voice (Rafferty & Restubog 2011).

Methodology

Data Sample In this study, we targeted the employees’ feedback about their job and supervisor’s characteristics and the supervisors’ evaluation of their subordinate employees and own performance. As explained before in the organisational context, we have contacted 4 groups that were responsible for supplying sales services - where 1 supervisor managed 10 employees. With the support of one supervisor, that made this research possible, we asked for 40 pairs of employee-supervisor dyads and we were able to collect the 40 dyads of both employees and their supervisors (100% response rate), plus 4 surveys on the supervisor self-assessment with no refusals.

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Despite the response rate, some employee evaluation surveys got excluded due to lack of reliability in their answers (20%), reducing the final sample to 32 valid dyads. Inside the final valid dyads, some answers were left empty - about 2% of all valid answers. In fact, question 4. was ignored by all employees. This question was related to the possible existence of conflicts of ideas inside their group. After analysing the physical survey structure, we realized that the question was not that visible and perceptible, which explains why nobody asked if it was a question to answer or not - the subdivision of the question 4. into 4.1. and 4.2. lead to the misunderstanding that it was not necessary to answer to question 4. Employee demographics had the following results: the majority was female (67%) – Graph 2. in appendix - having completed high school (40%) – Graph 3. in appendix ; average age is 32 years old (SD = 9) - the youngest employee has 18 years old. The majority is working for the organization for 1 to 3 years (48%); while working for the same supervisor mainly in the same period of time, 1 to 3 years (61%) – Graph 4. in appendix. In fact, only 19% is working for the same company and supervisor for less than 1 year.

Measures Independent variables used in this study were evaluated using several questions that accessed employees or supervisors true thoughts about a specific topic, like abusive supervision or ethical leadership for example, in a 7-item range from 1 “Strongly Disagree” to 7 “Strongly Agree” - except for control variables. These questions were later evaluated in terms of reliability, with the main purpose of identifying if they measured the respective topic with precision. The Cronbach’s Alpha was used to verify the reliability value, and variables were only accepted if they had a minimum Alpha ( ) of (.70).

Control Variables The variables of gender, age and education level were also examined due to Becker’s (2002) recommended use of legitimate suppressors for statistical power reasons - control variables. Education level was measured with a 1-6 scale : 1 - ”4th Grade”; “9th Grade”; “12th Grade”; “Some College”; “Completed College”; 6 - “Master/MBA”.

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Abusive Supervision (AS) In order to measure abusive supervision, we used Tepper’s (2000) 15-item scale, with questions like “My supervisor tells me I am incompetent” or “My supervisor breaks promises he/she makes” ( = .86).

Ethical Leadership (EL) Ethical leadership was accessed using the 10-item scale developed by Brown et al (2005), with sample questions such as “My supervisor defines success not just by results but also the way they are obtained” and “My supervisor makes fair and balanced decisions” ( = .88).

Affective Commitment to the Supervisor (ACTS) An 6-item scale, was taken from Stinglhamber et al.’s (2002) study to better approach affective commitment to the supervisor, with questions like “I feel a sense of respect for my supervisor”, “I feel proud to work with my supervisor” and, as a reversed item, “I do not admire my supervisor” ( = .90). It included two reversed questions,

Job Security (JS) An 6-item scale with questions such as “My job will be there as long as I want it” and “Regardless of economic conditions, I will have a job at my current organization” was used ( = .76; only 5 items consistent).

Error Management (EM) To access error management in this organization, an 8-item scale was used with questions like “I think a lot about how an error could have been avoided” and “After an error has occurred, I analyse it thoroughly” ( = .72).

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Workgroup Conflict (WC) To evaluate workgroup conflict, a 9-item scale, developed by Mannix (2001), was used with questions like “How much emotional conflict is there in your workgroup?” and “How often do people get angry while working in your work group?” ( = .94, excluding 1 item).

In-Role Behaviour (IRB) To analyse supervisor’s report about their employees in-role behaviour, a 5-item developed by Williams and Anderson (1991), with questions like “This employee adequately completes assigned duties” and “This employee performs tasks that are expected of him/her”, as for the reversed question “This employee neglects aspects of the job he/she is obligated to perform” ( = .90).

Extra-Role Performance (ERP) An 8-item scale, developed by Eisenberger et al. (2010), was used to access extra-role performance. It included questions like “This employee takes action to protect this organization from potential problems” and “This employee gains knowledge, skills, and abilities that will be of benefit to this organization” ( = .98).

Voice (V) In order to evaluate perceived employees voice by the supervisor, the 6-item scale developed by Van Dyne and LePine’s (1998) was used. It contained questions like “This particular co-worker develops and makes recommendations concerning issues that affect this work group” and “This particular co-worker gets involved in issues that affect the quality of work life here in this group” ( = .95).

Failure-Based Learning (FBL) Supervisors evaluated their employees’ capacity to learn from their failures based on Carmeli’s (2007) 7-item scale. This scale had questions like “ This employee always makes sure that we stop to reflect on the organisation’s work process” and “When a problem is raised concerning a lack of required resources for completing a task, our employees provide an immediate solution, but also inform the management and the relevant department about the problem” ( = .94).
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Results
The descriptive statistics, reliabilities, measured with the Cronbach’s Alpha, and the correlations between the studied variables are presented in Table 1 – see also appendix. Abusive supervision is negatively correlated with all the other analysed variables, with the exception of the control variables and workgroup conflict - due to lack of significance (p) in the values. Highlighted correlations would be the negative correlation between abusive supervision and ethical leadership (r = - .80, p < .01); the negative correlation between abusive supervision and error management (r = - .62, p < .01) and, most importantly, the negative correlation between abusive supervision and in-role behaviour (r = - .70, p < .01) – Graph 5. in appendix. Table 1. (Also in appendix)

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Since low levels of abusive supervision result in higher levels of performance, it was interesting to divide employees into 2 different groups, “Group 1 - Employees with Lower Than Average Performance Levels” - these are the employees that were rated with in-role behaviour values lower than 4 in the 1-7 scale explained before - and “Group 2 - Employees with Higher Than Average Performance Levels” - rated, by opposition with Group 1, with in-role behaviour values equal or above 4. This analysis was done in order to check if they would in fact register higher levels of abusive supervision. Other relations between these two groups with variables like affective commitment to the supervisor, job security, extra-role performance, failure-based learning and voice were also analysed to further our study on this organization context and current situation - while backing up this data analysis with theoretical background. According to Table 2 – see also appendix - the difference between Group 1 and Group 2 means, (Group 1 - Group 2), showed values of, for example, 1.42 in abusive supervision; -2.95 in extra-role performance; -2.67 in failure-based learning; and -2.62 in voice while being significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). Table 2. (Also in appendix)

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Discussion
The organisation accepts potential employees for a 2-weeks training. Then, the number of actual employees is just a fraction of the number that enters into the training program. Their performance is measured by goals. This means that they have to reach a certain number of answered calls that end up in a successful sale. If this goal is not reached in a certain month, the employee in question will have a meeting with her/his superiors, where they discuss about the employee’s latest performance. If she/he does not improve performance, she/he will get fired. In this call-center, employees are offered temporary and non-vinculative contracts - being officially considered independent workers according to the Portuguese Labour System. Regarding our main topic, abusive supervision, the mean of the variable can be considered high (3.06). Thus, according to the studies conducted by Aryee et al. (2007); Zellars, Tepper, & Duffy (2002), the performance of employees and their extra-role activities should have a lower mean, because employees would try to restore a sense of justice and be counter-productive. Thus, the employees who answered this survey are high-performers - the in-role behaviour has a mean of 5.01 and the extra-role performance has a mean of 4.8 – they will have to work according to the organization‘s expectations, because if they do not, they will not be, in this organization, for long - most of them are in the company from one up to three years. We decided to compare workers who were above and below the mean of in-role behaviour. Using in-role behaviour to measure employees’ performance in the workplace, it was important to check how employees with lower than average levels of performance – values lower than 4 in the 1-7 scale, explained before – would perceive levels of abusive supervision and affective commitment to the supervisor and how they would be evaluated, by their supervisor, in extra-role performance, voice and failure-based learning. The employees who were rated by their supervisor with lower than average levels of performance are, in fact, the ones that are less affective committed to their supervisors and report higher levels of abusive supervision. On the supervisor’s perspective, these employees have lower levels of extra-role performance, voice and failure-based learning. The theoretical overview strengthens the fact that lower-performers suffer more from abusive supervision, because employees who are less productive fit the victim profile - “annoying, aggravating and difficult to work with” (Olweus, 1978). Any type of conflict (task, process, or relationship conflict) raised by the subordinate may trigger hostile actions from the supervisor (Rispens, Giebels & Jehn, 2010).
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These employees also express lower levels of job security, in comparison with their co-workers with above than average levels of performance. Moreover, according to Greenhalgh, & Rosenblatt (1984), as the employees feel job insecurity, their performance will decrease. As the performance decreases, the lower-performers will likely feel more abusive supervision, because a relationship conflict may emerge when the supervisor does not like an employee, what may happen when the employee has a low performance. Consequently, the affective commitment to the supervisor will decrease even more, and logically to the organization as a whole (Levinson, 1965). This extrapolation will most likely end when the employee gets fired – our study reveals that lower-performers have low prosocial voice behaviour; “the expression of change-oriented comments with a motive to improve rather than just criticize a situation” (LePine and Van Dyne, 2001; Van Dyne, Ang and Botero, 2003). We could argue that unsatisfied and lower-performers would have incentives to leave the organization as soon as possible, according to Tepper (2000). However, since the majority of the workers has only concluded high school, and the unemployment rate is higher between this education level than in comparison to college education, they are economically dependent of the organisation and afraid of what would be if they left the organization (reasons reported by Walker (1979). Although, the employees are paid as independent workers (through “recibos verdes”), they have a mean of job security of 4.96, which is related with the employees’ knowledge that if they perform well and respect the company‘s policy, they will not be unemployed – employees are extremely well-selected regardless of the turnover rate (Philip, Salzman, and Tilly, 2008). The call-center belongs to a big company in the gas sector – which can lead to fewer expectations of the firm going bankrupt. We were expecting a lower mean of job security, due to the high turnover of the call-center industry (33%, in 2009) and to the job conditions that were mentioned to us while collecting the data. Error management has a mean of 5.18, but there is still space for improvement. Although error management is negatively correlated with abusive supervision, error has to be managed even when dealing with high levels of abusive supervision, because employees need to improve their performance (van Dyck, Frese et al., 2005) to achieve their monthly goals in order to be able to keep their jobs. They have to learn from their mistakes – failure-based learning is positively correlated with error management. Prosocial voice behaviour is negatively correlated with abusive supervision, because the treatment they receive violates moral and social principles (LePine and Van Dyne, 2001; Van Dyne, Ang and Botero, 2003). Therefore, people do not want to express their opinion (Rafferty & Restubog,
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2011). Supervisors also reinforce the need for “rules to be followed”, which does not help new ideas to emerge. The organisation may be facing the paradox of success, because they are being successful and profitable by practising already established routines. Therefore, they are resistant to change these routines even when receiving negative feedback (Audia et al, 2006). For example, the company knows some struggles of the employees through the surveys that are regularly done, but they are not eager to change them. The workers can also notice that their opinion is not being heard – this can explain the reason why we had eight dyads ranking four in every question. They can think there is no point in expressing their opinion. Prosocial voice behaviour is positively correlated with group conflict. As the affective commitment to the supervisor has a mean of 5.14, the main conflict is between employees. The supervisor complained about the lack of equal attention that they can give to their team members, the conflict is about the amount of attention that the supervisor gives to each worker, being given more attention to the higher-performers, which increases the affective commitment to the supervisor. Thus, the lower-performers feel that they need closer attention from the supervisor, which it is not being given to them. Thus, they lack affective commitment to their supervisor. Abusive leadership is negatively correlated with ethical leadership, because the supervisors are seen as part of the organisation, and it is expected an “ethical” behaviour from their part (Rousseau, 1995). For example, when the supervisor controls the “bathroom break”, only letting one person at a time, he/she is having a behaviour that is seen as “unethical”, which will overshadow all the “ethical” behaviours the supervisors have (Palanski, 2014). This fact, explains the high mean of abusive supervision (3.06). In this call-center, abusive supervision is done by the imposition of strict rules as it was mentioned before, and the on-and-off reminder that subordinates can be replaced if they do not perform according to expectations, i.e., from a group of potential employees, only the best stay in the company after training - about 98% of the workers mentioned that they saw the workforce being reduced, in the last two years.

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Recommendations
It is part of the company`s policy to do surveys in a regular basis, so they are aware of the employees’ feedback. However, the organization does not have a proactive behaviour and lacks the ability to tackle problematic issues about complaints and suggestions done by the employees. Abusive supervision has a strong and negative correlation with ethical leadership, voice, extrarole performance, in-role behaviour and error management. Therefore, if there is a decrease of abusive supervision, the other variables will increase. Thus, a decrease in abusive supervision boosts the overall performance, and profitability of the organization. Our first recommendation is the implementation of a continuous training program for the supervisors, in order to assure they behave “ethically” without mistreating employees, since mistreated employees are more likely to later engage in abusive supervision (Jeanquart & Mangold, 2002). Therefore, the company should focus on training programs regarding “the areas of emotional intelligence, anger management and other behavioural tools” (Harris, Kacmar, & Zivnuska, 2007). In addition to the supervisors training, we suggest a subordinate training program that will teach and help employees to cope with abusive behaviours, in order to avoid the negative effects of this type of behaviour on their performance (Boswell, & Olson-Buchanan, 2004). Furthermore, effective training programs will contribute to interpersonal and team-based communication skills. Thus, training programs contribute for improvements in team member satisfaction. (Jeanquart & Mangold , 2002). Close affective relationships between co-workers will help the coping process, due to the importance of the social support in the working environment (Wayne, Liden, & Sparrowe, 1994). Thus, we suggest the adoption of actions that increase the affective commitment amongst co-workers. This improvement could be achieved by reducing the teams’ dimension and by improving communications between employees through platforms as skype and dropbox - possible software that allows the share of thoughts and documents, respectively - stimulating the employees to develop closer relations. The physical proximity of the team can help to increase the communication among the team (Kraut, Fussell, Brennan, and Siegel, 2002). However, the psychological distance is also important, because sharing information cannot only be resolved with physical proximity. Thus, we suggest the development of a team identity, “common perspective of cohesiveness and mutual acceptance among team members” (Earley and Mosakowski, 2000), that facilitates conversations between team members

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(Hinds and Mortensen, 2005), or even a clear communication of the company´s values that would discriminate “unethical” behaviours. Since some supervisors reported that they were not able to comply with all their work while answering to subordinates’ individual questions, we suggest the practice of a pitch, once every two weeks, where the supervisor makes an evaluation of the team’s overall and individual performance, while receiving feedback and answering to common questions about working procedures, that may be common to several employees. Each supervisor will do a report about the subordinates’ concerns, and sent it to the Human Resources Department. Thus, the level of communication and pro-social behaviour will increase. Thereby, the organization will achieve a higher level of team member satisfaction. In fact, openness in communication is linked to job satisfaction, which leads to a well-functioning organization (Jeanquart & Mangold, 2002). To cope with the negative outcomes of abusive supervision, the organization should adopt actions to diminish effects, like stress, that negatively affects performance. To decrease overall levels of stress, the managers should “design realistic objectives and schedules while planning reasonable downtimes that would allow the team to recover from the project’s high strains” (Jeffery LePine, Nathan Podsakoff, & Marcie LePine, 2005). Another recommendation is to prioritise different tasks that the supervisors have to perform, since high stress levels can increase abusive supervision (Spector, 1997, cit. by Zellars et al., 2002). Thus, a reduction of stress will result in lower abusive behaviours towards the subordinates. In addition, they should provide team members with some higher levels of autonomy for their decision-making, since according to Chong et al. (2012) this will “help teams to feel that they are trusted”, and will decrease the levels of abusive supervision while enhancing individual performance. When employees express their constructive comments, they have to take a risk for the firm (Van Dyne, Ang and Botero, 2003), and if the employee is poorly treated by the supervisor, he will not be willing to take any personal risk (Rafferty, and Restubog, 2011). Moreover, in this organization, when an employee wants to go to the Human Resources Department and make some suggestions, he has to ask to the supervisor to schedule a meeting with the HR Department, which is another obstacle for them to have a prosocial voice. Thus, we suggest that the firm gives some autonomy to the employees, i.e., being able to schedule the meetings with the HR department by email (without asking for the permission of the supervisor).

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Perceived Organisational Support, POS, is important, because employees perceive that the organisation cares about their well-being and supports them. Thus, it will create in them some kind of obligation to care about the organisation’s well-being and to support the organisation in achieving its objectives (Eisenberg, Armeli, Rexwinkel, Lynch & Rhoades, 2001). Furthermore, POS will also increase “satisfaction, job involvement, positive mood at work, extra-role performance and desire to remain in the organisation” (Rhoades, and Eisenberger, 2002). In the light of these advantages, it is in the best interest of the organization to invest in POS implementation. As a suggestion, the organisation can make partnerships with companies, i.e., a gym, to offer promotions and better conditions to the employees when they use other companies’ services. The example of a partnership with a gym is given, because it is crucial that employees manage their stress level, because stress diminishes the capacity of coping with demanding situations (Jeffery LePine, Nathan, & Marcie LePine, 2005).

Limitations
The biggest limitation is the small dimension of the sample: it does not permit general conclusions, because “small samples reduce statistical power” (Aguinis & Harden, 2009, cit. by Neves, 2014). Another limitation is a direct consequence of the conditions under which the surveys were delivered. We were only allowed to deliver the surveys during the employees and supervisors lunch time so, it is assumed that they have lower willingness to spend the required time to fill correctly the surveys, resulting in possible biased results. The lack of time available plus the lack of proactive behaviour from the organisation to deal with the employees´ problems and suggestions explains the eight employees that filled the survey using a “4 rage” method. To assure that our results would not get biased, these surveys, and possible meaningless answers were not considered into the data analysis. A third limitation concerns the lack of reliability of some variables. For example, followership was not reliable (max = .62) and error aversion would only be reliable if we excluded 6 items from a total of 8 items, these variables were not included in data analysis. There is a lack of data concerning Portuguese call-centers. It would be interesting to compare data about the levels of abusive supervision between the industry and this particular department. Despite of the existing limitations, we were able to get exclusive information from a supervisor, our contact
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inside the organization. This contact provided important information regarding the contract structure, the internal environment and the role of employees inside the company. These information were used to create more feasible and “organization aligned” recommendations regarding the overall performance of the organization.

Conclusion
Regarding the data analysis, it was surprising the high mean of abusive supervision when in comparison with the mean of ethical leadership, and job security. The results for job security can be explained, because they are high-performers (most of them are in the company for about 1 to 3 years), and they know that, if they respect the company’s policy and achieve goals in terms of sales and answered calls, they will be able to maintain their job position. In the case of ethical leadership, the value is high because the supervisors do not mistreat the employees in a regular daily basis. This is explained by the fact that abusive supervision is mostly, in this organization, in the form of strict rules that the employees must respect and follow. The correlation between abusive supervision, and in-role behaviour, extra-role performance, voice, error management, ethical leadership are all negative and strong. Therefore, if the organization decides to reduce abusive supervision, the other variables will increase, and they will be able to achieve a better work environment and by that, a better performance, which results in a higher profit. We believe that with our recommendations, the company could improve in some aspects that affect positively the levels of extra-role performance while enhancing overall performance levels.

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Appendix

Graph 1.

Unemployement Rate
18 16
PERCENTAGE

14 12 10 8 6 4 2006 2007 Total 2008 Superior 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 Secundário e pós secundário

Graph 2.

Gender Distribution

Male 33% Female 67%

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Graph 3.

Educational Level
0,45 0,40 0,35
PERCENTAGE

0,30 0,25 0,20 0,15 0,10 0,05 0,00 9th Grade 12th Grade Some College Completed College Master / MBA

Graph 4.

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Graph 5.

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