Moderator: Associate Professor Dongyuan Wu

Time: Friday, April 24, 2026, 2:00-3:30 p.m.

Venue: Guoshun Campus, Starr Building, Room 410

Topic: Leader Felt Trust Deficit: A Path to Abusive Supervision via Shame

Abstract: Having follower trust is critical for leadership effective, yet leaders can experience a felt trust deficit -the feeling that they are not fully trusted by a follower -in a leader-follower relationship. We propose that when a leader perceives a felt trust deficit from a follower, they view it as a threat to their social self as it suggests that the follower questions them as a leader. This appraisal evokes shame, which in turn leads to abusive supervision toward the follower as a defensive response to protect the self. Moreover, the indirect relationship is amplified when a leader perceives status threat from their colleagues. Findings from a series of studies supported our model. Together, our research highlights the role of felt trust in influencing leaders' emotions and behaviors and underscores its implications for leader-follower relationships.

Speaker: Dejun "Tony" Kong

Chair, Social Responsibility and Sustainability Division

Professor and PhD Director, Organizational Leadership and Information Analytics

Faculty Director, Business Leadership Certificate Program

Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder

Bio:

Dejun "Tony" Kong (Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis, USA) is Professor and Ph.D. Director of Organizational Leadership and Information Analytics and Chair of the Social Responsibility and Sustainability Division at the University of Colorado Boulder's Leeds School of Business. His research seeks to address how to enable people to be more prosocial. Specifically, he focuses on three streams of research: (a) fostering individuals’positive experiences, (b) fostering an exceptional organizational system, and (c) fostering a high-trust society. He is featured on Stanford’s list of top 2% scientists in the world and the Poets & Quants list of 40-under-40 best business professors (2019). He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Management and Human Relations and a Senior Associate Editor of the Journal of Organizational Behavior. He is also a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and Program Chair of the Academy of Management's Conflict Management Division.