Chapter 2: It Doesn’t Stay at Home: Spillover of Abusive Relationships to the Workplace

Although abusive supervision has been shown to have an impact on the family domain, the impact of abuse that originates at home on the work domain has, for the most part, been ignored. This study examines the extent to which experiencing psychological aggression at home impacts employees at work. Affective events theory and spillover theory are integrated to describe the underlying process of how psychological aggression spills over into the work domain and the resulting behaviors through affective reactions. Using structural equation modeling, an analysis of 313 employees who were married or in a committed relationship provided support for most study hypotheses, which predicted that psychological aggression at home would spill over into the workplace, increasing employee perceptions of workplace stress and that this would lead to workplace deviance. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed and suggestions for future research are provided.