Relationship between Abusive Leadership Style and Deviant Behavior (Case Study: Sport and Youth Organizations of Northern Khorasan)

The purpose of this work was to determine the relationship between abusive leadership and deviant behavior in sport and youth organizations in Northern Khorasan.
This study in terms of purpose was an applied study, and in terms of data collection was a descriptive–correlation one. The research statistical population was all the employees of sport and youth organizations in Northern Khorasan (N = 466). Using cluster sampling based on geographic region and the Cochran formula, 211 individuals’ comments were received. Tepper (2000) abusive supervision questionnaire and Bennett and Robinson (2000) deviant behavior questionnaire were used in collecting the data. Data analysis was performed by the Pearson correlation and regression analysis.
The results obtained showed that there was a significant positive relation between abusive leadership and deviant behavior (p ≤ 0.01). The correlation coefficient between these variables was 0.68. Also there were positive significant relations between abusive leadership with the interpersonal deviance and organizational deviance (p ≤ 0.01) with the correlation coefficients of 0.61 and 0.62, respectively. In addition, according to the regression analysis, the abusive leadership was a good predictor of deviant behavior, and explained 45% of changes in this variable (p ≤ 0.01).
Based on the findings of the study, it can be expected that with reduction in the abusive leadership, the deviant behavior of employees will be reduced.