BUS603: Managing People

The media frequently reports stories about so-called "bad bosses". On a closer look, these destructive leader behaviors come in many forms. Recently, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, was announced as winner of the world's "worst boss" award at the 3rd International Trade Union Confederation World Congress in Berlin, because Amazon is said to exploit its workers. Microsoft was also in the press, when a senior manager was arrested on federal charges for stealing more than 9 million USD from the company to pay for a lavish lifestyle. Steve Jobs of Apple, on the other hand, was known for an aggressive leadership style, shouting at and humiliating others.

It is intuitively compelling that an abusive leader, who shouts, has a different effect on a follower than a leader who exploits followers, or a leader who violates organizational rules. Unfortunately, we do not have empirical evidence to know if this is simply a lay assumption or if followers do have different reactions to different types of destructive leader behaviors. One reason for this is that comparative research in the field of destructive leadership is scarce. Rather, empirical work in the field is characterized by isolated investigations of separate destructive leadership constructs, resulting in a body of evidence that seems somewhat scattered and disconnected. This is unfortunate for both theory and practice. From a theoretical perspective, we still know too little about the unique and relative contributions of different destructive leader behaviors regarding negative follower outcomes. As a consequence, practitioners have little guidance when it comes to distinguishing, detecting, and managing different forms of destructive leadership in organizational contexts.

This is further aggravated since a broad body of research evidence suggests that negative information has a stronger influence on us and that we perceive and process negative events in a more nuanced way than positive ones. This "bad is stronger than good" phenomenon has important implications for the domain of leadership. Not only are destructive leader behaviors likely to have a far stronger impact on followers than constructive behaviors, but the adverse impact of such destructive behaviors is likely to outweigh the benefits gained from positive relationships (e.g., with coworkers or customers). Negative interactions with a leader are likely perceived as more nuanced and more dissimilar from each other than in the case of positive information about the leader. In our view, this makes understanding the differential effects of different destructive leader behaviors even more urgent. Thus, our main purpose in this article is to investigate whether and to what degree different types of destructive leadership may affect followers in a distinct way. In our theoretical model, we draw on the work of Einarsen, Schyns and Schilling. We argue that the target of the leader's behavior and the level of hostility are key factors in understanding the potentially unique effects of different types of destructive leader behavior on followers. Specifically, we focus in our study on three constructs of destructive leadership: (1) abusive supervision, as a behavior high on hostility focusing on the follower; (2) exploitative leadership, as a behavior low on hostility focusing on the follower; and (3) organization-directed destructive leadership, as a behavior low on hostility focusing on the organization.

In order to answer the question of how far these different destructive leader behaviors elicit different reactions in followers, we draw on emotions as the first reaction to an interaction with a leader. Furthermore, we investigate the intention to leave, one of the most well-researched outcomes in destructive leadership research and highly relevant to organizations. We thus deem these outcomes as most suited to understanding different follower reactions to destructive leadership.