While research has broadly explored the supervisor-related and organization-related antecedents of abusive supervision, there is a paucity of research concerning subordinate-related antecedents, particularly based on which managers and employees could inhibit abusive supervision in practice. Prior work has suggested that subordinates’ characteristics and behaviors might be critical origins leading to the occurrence of abusive supervision. Drawing on job resources-demands theory, moral exclusion theory, and social influence theory, the present study investigates how subordinates’ political skills reduce employees’ perception of abusive supervision, via improving their task performance (in-role performance) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB, extra-role performance). A 3-wave research design involving 224 employees from a Chinese transportation company was carried out to test the proposed hypotheses. The findings reveal that individual political skill is not directly associated with the perception of abusive supervision. However, political skill indirectly mitigates abusive supervision via OCB. Conversely, the mediating effect of task performance is not found. By articulating the mechanism linking political skill to abusive supervision, our study extends the knowledge of the nomological network of subordinate-related antecedents. In the end, the practical implications and future research guidance are discussed.
