BUS603: Managing People

The conceptual paper by de Vries reviewed personality traits and their links with dark leadership styles. The Three Nightmare Traits (TNT), leaders' dishonesty, disagreeableness, and carelessness, were found to be aligned with low honesty-humility, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Using a Situation-Trait-Outcome-Activation (STOA) model the author argued that specific situations should attract TNT leaders, activate their dark-side traits, and result in (mainly but not exclusively) negative outcomes in relation to the recognition, perception, and attribution of leadership.

In addition, three of the published articles gave primary attention to the question of what dark-side leaders do and how they affect followers at work and in terms of their personal lives. This widens our scope of leadership behaviors that are perceived as negative, and allows us to explore more discrete types of negative behaviors and their outcomes.

Three different types of destructive leadership and their effects on follower outcomes were assessed in an experiment and a field study by Schmid. Differentiating between distinct types of negative leadership their research focuses on follower-directed (abusive supervision), organization-directed, and self-interested (exploitative) destructive behaviors. All three forms of dark-side leader behaviors predicted followers' negative affect. However, abusive supervision elicited the highest levels of fear. In relation to turnover intentions, exploitative leadership and abusive supervision affected calculative and immediate turnover intentions similarly.

Nauman. extended the research to explore how dark-side leadership affects the private sphere of life of the employees. They assessed despotic leadership (i.e., tendencies toward authoritarian and dominant behavior in pursuit of self-interest, self-aggrandizement, and exploitation of others) and its negative effects, which the authors hypothesized would transcend from the workplace to subordinates' personal lives (increased emotional exhaustion and work-family conflict, and decreased life satisfaction). The results confirmed their hypotheses. They show that negative forms of leadership can also affect our personal lives, homes and families and opens up a new field of research at the work-life interface. The work also connects with our second theme, the interplay between traits of leaders and followers. In this study, followers' anxiety increased the negative impact of despotic leadership.

Schyns. extended the perspective from dark-side leader behaviors to follower perceptions and attributions of these behaviors. Comparing different levels of abusive behavior (constructive leadership, laissez-faire leadership, mild to strong abuse), they analyzed follower perceptions of abusive supervision and follower attributions as moderators. The three-study series employed manipulations of leaders' abusive behaviors and established attributions of the leaders' intentionality in the behavior and the level of his/her control as moderators. Relationships between abusive supervision perceptions and outcome variables (loyalty, turnover, and voice) were largely buffered by the attribution of leader intentionality. In Study 3, a survey of abusive supervision perceptions, however, control attributions strengthened the relationships with loyalty and voice.