BUS603: Managing People

In line with prior research, our results confirm that destructive leadership is a critical source of negative affect among followers. Since negative affect has generally been shown to undermine employees' social wellbeing and productivity, it is theoretically and practically useful to understand the different influence leaders may have in this regard. Our results extend existing knowledge by showing that different forms of destructive leader behavior have different effects on both the type and intensity of negative affect. Specifically, our results indicate that, in contrast to exploitative leadership, abusive supervision is more strongly related to anxiety among followers. This anxiety is reflected in increased arousal and feelings of loss of control. These higher levels of anxiety may be explained through the more hostile and direct attack on the follower posed by abusive supervision. This hostility – i.e., shouting at followers or ridiculing them in public – is a high threat to the self-worth of the follower and may thus result in feelings of submissiveness and anxiousness.

This difference in follower emotional reactions is important, since previous research indicates that negative affect is related to stronger effects in organizations than positive affect, and also to more nuanced effects on followers' behavior. As an example, previous research suggests that different emotions relate to how employees' attribute blame. Related to our results, this means that anxiety in followers may likely be related to blame being attributed internally, and so followers blaming themselves for leaders' behavior. Thus, abusive supervision may be more likely to result in internal attributions of blame, whereas followers with an exploitative leader may rather attribute blame externally – i.e., blame the leader for taking credit for their work. This attribution will likely set in motion very distinct behavioral dynamics, since whether employees attribute destructive leadership internally or externally has been linked to the occurrence of distinct forms of workplace deviance. Specifically, according to the causal reasoning model of counterproductive work behavior, external attributions are more likely to trigger retaliatory behaviors (such as hiding knowledge or sabotage), whereas internal attributions are thought to trigger more self-destructive deviance (such as drug and alcohol abuse;). Thus, the difference in attribution relates to very different follower behaviors; previous research has shown, furthermore, that it also relates to decision-making and risk-taking. Thus, an abusive supervisor, by relating to higher anxiety in followers, may inhibit risk-taking behavior which would in the long run impede the innovation and flexibility of teams and ultimately the entire organization.

Although our results relate to emotions at the individual follower level, they nevertheless imply that different destructive leader behaviors trigger distinct emotional reactions in followers, and these different emotional reactions may trigger very distinct dynamics in teams and organizations. In fact, emotions in organizations are described as a multilevel phenomenon and Ashkanasy and Dorris posited that emotions act at different levels ranging from the individual level to the team level and the organizational level. Leadership plays an important role in this multilevel phenomenon, since it enables emotions to spread from the individual to the organization through the process of emotional contagion.

A similar pattern, suggesting distinct dynamics resulting from different destructive leader behaviors, was found for turnover intention. Although our results regarding immediate and calculative turnover intention are not as clear as expected, they do suggest that different leader behaviors, depending on how hostile they are and how directly they attack the follower, may trigger a more or less immediate need to act. Thus, the time frame for different destructive leader behaviors to unfold their destructive effect may vary. In a related line of research, it was shown that narcissists make good first impressions and only over time, when their dark side shows, do perceptions others have of them change for the worse. Narcissists are seen as charming and confident on first encounter, while their exploitative and manipulative side only shows over time, leading to a delay in negative effect on others. A similar effect can be assumed for exploitative leadership. Schmid described that exploitative leadership can be seemingly friendly. The hostile behaviors of an abusive leader may be more immediately threatening and harder to tolerate on a daily basis.

However, our results also show a counterintuitive pattern: that is, in Study 2, followers' intentions to immediately leave an abusive leader were low. The underlying explanation may be that the decision to leave a job depends on many factors, and we need to consider situational as well as individual factors. An important factor is the availability of other employment options. Thus, the socioeconomic environment needs to be taken into account. Besides the job market, another important factor is how a follower judges their employability. Victims of abuse are often low in self-esteem and may not rate their employability very highly; they may thus remain in an (abusive) workplace, although it seems counterintuitive.

As mentioned above, attribution may play an important role in unfolding the destructive leadership dynamic. While emotions relate to different attribution patterns, followers' individual attribution style should also play an important role. Different attribution of why the leader is showing certain destructive behaviors will relate to different conclusions and, in consequence, different follower behaviors. An abusive supervisor, showing hostile behaviors, may rather lead to an attribution of hostile intentions, whereas an exploitative leader, taking credit for others' work and manipulating others to advance their career, may be seen as rather overly ambitious. While this will naturally lead to different individual follower behavioral reactions, we can also imagine that it will impact the team dynamics differentially. Whereas a leader that is seen as hostile may prompt a team to rally together and create cohesion, a leader that is exploitative may rather create a focus on individual self-interest in the team.

Taken together, our results show a very complex pattern of different destructive leader behaviors and point to the importance of understanding nuances in destructive leadership. Since previous research suggests that it may be easier to discourage desired follower behaviors, such as creativity, than to encourage them, understanding how the destructive leadership dynamics unfold seems crucial for organizations. With this study, we contribute to the advancement of destructive leadership theory and methodology by providing empirical evidence that followers indeed have different reactions to different destructive leadership behaviors and that these reactions are able to provide unique information in terms of predicting followers' emotions and turnover intentions. This has important implications for the landscape of destructive leadership, since the literature so far has overlooked important insights from a methodological, theoretical, and practical perspective. From the perspective of theory advancement, we may overlook mediators and outcomes that are specific to a certain type of destructive leadership behavior. From a methodological perspective, the fact that the majority of studies examine one type of destructive leadership in relation to an outcome and do not compare the effects of different destructive leadership behaviors may result in under- or over-estimations of the true effects. Related to this, with this being only the second empirical study on exploitative leadership that we are aware of, we also make a further contribution to the construct validity of the new construct of exploitative leadership.