Enough is enough! The impact of core self-evaluation on the relationship between despotic leadership and individual outcomes

Seung Yeon Son and Jongwook Pak ()
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Seung Yeon Son: Korea National Defense University
Jongwook Pak: The University of Auckland Business School

Review of Managerial Science, 2024, vol. 18, issue 3, No 3, 777-798

Abstract: Abstract Recently, there has been a surge of studies on the dark side of leader behaviors. The current research builds around a newly emerging concept in this line of inquiry–despotic leadership. We add to the despotic leadership research by investigating: (1) How leaders’ despotic behaviors damage the supervisor-subordinate relationship and subsequent follower outcomes, and (2), More importantly, how subordinates’ trait disposition engenders differing reactions to leader despotism. Specifically, we investigate how employees’ core self-evaluation (CSE) engenders differing reactions to despotic leadership. In doing so, we draw on self-verification theory to predict that the negative impact of despotic leadership on subordinate outcomes becomes deteriorating further under the presence of high CSE. Our empirical analyses of 226 supervisor-subordinate dyads demonstrated that despotic leadership is negatively associated with leader-member exchange (LMX), thereby undermining subordinates’ task performance and knowledge sharing. Most conspicuously, the self-verification view of CSE regarding the despotism-outcome link indeed received strong support. Given that prior studies on the role of CSE have produced somewhat mixed results, we timely extended the current discourse by explicating why despotic leadership could potentially be more harmful to those individuals high on CSE.

Keywords: Despotic leadership; Core self-evaluation; Leader-member exchange; Task performance; Knowledge sharing; 91Cxx (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1007/s11846-023-00622-3

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