Open Journal of Accounting, 2021, 10, 17-29 https://www.scirp.org/journal/ojacct ISSN Online: 2169-3412 ISSN Print: 2169-3404 DOI: 10.4236/ojacct.2021.102003 Mar. 12, 2021 17 Open Journal of Accounting The Effect of Abusive Supervision on Budget Slack: The Mediating Role of Emotional Exhaustion Ying Tong * , Manoch Prompanyo School of Management, Shinawatra University, Bangkok, Thailand Abstract Past research demonstrates that abuse supervision significantly impacts sub- ordinates’ psychological distress, attitudes, workplace deviant behaviors and performance and thus has strong implications for organization. Most scholars believe that budget slack will lead to waste of resources and inefficient enter- prises. How to restrain budget slack has always been one of the focus prob- lems in budget practice and research. However, abuse supervision has not been explored in a budgeting context. Accordingly, we introduce the abusive supervision into the budget context and complement other negative behavior induced by abusive supervision to explore the influence path of abusive su- pervision on budget slack. Our results imply that the abusive supervision has a positive impact on budget slack of subordinate. In addition, emotional ex- haustion played a fully mediating effect between abusive supervision and budget slack. Keywords Abusive Supervision, Budget Slack, Emotional Exhaustion 1. Introduction As a kind of negative leadership behavior, abusive supervision exists in all kinds of organizations around the world, and has many negative effects on subordi- nates’ attitude and behavior (Harvey et al., 2007; Huang et al., 2017). Several studies focus on negative consequences of abusive supervision. For example, Tepper (2000) finds that when subordinates perceive superiors’ abusive supervi- sion, they usually reduce their emotional commitment to the organization, lead- ing to workplace deviant behavior. Sun (2019) empirically demonstrates that the How to cite this paper: Tong, Y., & Prompanyo, M. (2021). The Effect of Ab- usive Supervision on Budget Slack: The Mediating Role of Emotional Exhaustion. Open Journal of Accounting, 10, 17-29. https://doi.org/10.4236/ojacct.2021.102003 Received: October 16, 2020 Accepted: March 9, 2021 Published: March 12, 2021 Copyright © 2021 by author(s) and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Open Access