BUS603: Managing People

The main purpose of this article was to investigate if different destructive leadership behaviors may affect followers in a distinct way. Our focus was on three destructive leadership constructs: abusive supervision, exploitative leadership, and organization-directed destructive leadership. To answer the question of how far these behaviors would elicit different reactions in followers, we investigated followers' emotions as the first reaction to an interaction with leaders and the intention to leave. The results of both a scenario-based experimental study and a field study suggest that exploitative leadership does indeed influence different outcomes compared to leaders behaving in an abusive manner or leaders behaving in a manner that harms the organization. As expected, all three constructs had a positive relationship with negative affect. Yet, with regard to the afraid dimension of the PANAS, higher scores for abusive supervision were found. Organization-directed destructive leader behavior showed marginal relevance with regard to different urgencies of turnover intention. However, exploitative leadership and abusive supervision affected calculative and immediate turnover intentions to a similar degree. In what follows, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these results in more detail.