What if authoritarian to all or to some? A multi-level investigation of within-team differentiation in authoritarian leadership

Zahide Karakitapoğlu-Aygün, Lale Gumusluoglu, Alper Erturk and Terri A. Scandura

Journal of Business Research, 2023, vol. 162, issue C

Abstract: The literature on the bright side of leadership has established that leaders differentiate among their followers. This paper examines a negative leadership style, authoritarian leadership (AL) and, based on group value and engagement models, proposes that AL differentiation softens the negative effects of mean AL on team cohesion, which in turn influences team and individual performance. Based on social comparison and justice theories, we also test the opposite effects of AL differentiation on these outcomes as a competing hypothesis. The results (multi-source cross-level data from 381 employees of 63 teams) support our main hypothesis but not the competing hypothesis. When team leaders exhibited authoritarian behaviors to all members (low differentiation), team cohesion decreased drastically, which reduced individual (in-role, extra-role, but not innovative performance) and team performance. In the high differentiation condition, the negative effects of mean AL via team cohesion on in-role and extra-role performance and team performance were alleviated.

Keywords: Authoritarian leadership; Authoritarian leadership differentiation; Team cohesion; Performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014829632300231X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:162:y:2023:i:c:s014829632300231x

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2023.113873

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().