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Research has overwhelmingly focused on the positive side of leadership in the past. However, research into negative aspects of leadership is picking up pace. This chapter will provide an overview of two prominent aspects of negative leadership, namely, abusive supervision and laissez-faire leadership. Research has shown that both types of leadership have significant negative consequences both for organisations as a whole as well as individual followers. Examples include lower job satisfaction, stress, as well as lowered performances and a higher likelihood of counter-productive work behaviour. Both abusive supervision and laissez-faire researchers acknowledge that these leadership styles take effect through the perception of followers. That is, they consider that the same behaviour can be interpreted differently by different followers and will, hence, lead to different follower-related outcomes. Abusive supervision and laissez-faire are, however, very different in terms of the actual leader behaviours described. While abusive supervision is a style that is actively destructive, laissez-faire is destructive via lack of support for followers' goal achievement. We end the chapter with an outlook for future research, notably an attempt to systematise future research into destructive leadership with respect to the different forms it can take.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between police officers’ affective organizational commitment, work engagement, and (perceived) service performance.

Participants included 114 police officers who completed a questionnaire that measured their affective commitment, social job resources, supervisor support, work engagement, and extra-role performance (i.e. offering service to colleagues). A dyadic design was used that related police officer commitment to the perceived service performance as rated by 165 crime victims (cross-over effect).

Results of structural equation modeling revealed that commitment was positively related to seeking colleague support to increase social job resources. Furthermore, the results indicated that supervisor support mediated the positive relationship between commitment and work engagement/extra-role performance. In contrast, commitment was negatively related to the perceived service performance of police officers as rated by crime victims.

The results indicate that while affective commitment supports police officers’ work engagement and promotes the seeking and offering of colleague assistance, it also tempers external service performance ratings.

This paper enhances the understanding of how the affective commitment of police officers can be related differently to internal and external outcomes. The results are discussed in relation to police culture and performance theory.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the mechanism through which perceived empowerment practices in a firm influence employees’ organizational identification. Specifically, the authors posit the mediating role of leader‒member exchange (LMX) and the moderating role of leader trustworthiness in the relationship.

Data were collected through survey from 236 white-collar employees working in 20 private companies in Turkey. The authors tested the model using hierarchical regression and conditional process analysis.

Findings of this study are as follows: first, LMX mediates the relationship between empowerment practices and organizational identification, second, leader integrity, a dimension of trustworthiness, moderates the relationship between empowerment practices and LMX and the relationship between LMX and organizational identification and, third, leader integrity moderates the indirect effect of empowerment practices on organizational identification via LMX. These direct and indirect effects are stronger when leaders have higher integrity than when they have lower integrity.

This study enhances the understanding of the mechanism through which empowerment practices influence employees’ organizational identification.

Customer sweethearting is a common illicit behavior of frontline employees in service firms. This paper aims to examine the impact of supportive–disloyal leadership behavior on customer sweethearting at different levels of leader–member exchange (LMX) quality.

Drawing on imitation theory and need-to-belong theory, the paper builds a conceptual model and empirically tests it using data from a survey-based study and a complementary experiment.

The authors find that employees’ customer sweethearting is affected by their supervisors’ supportive–disloyal behavior (employee sweethearting) through two divergent paths: employees imitate the sweethearting behavior of their supervisors; and employee sweethearting triggers employees’ feelings of belongingness to their organization, which reduces their customer sweethearting behavior.

The findings suggest that service firms can mitigate customer sweethearting by raising awareness that supervisors act as negative role models to subordinates and fostering high-quality LMX relationships, which give employees a sense of belonging to the supervisor and the organization.

By taking supervisors’ supportive–disloyal leadership behavior as an ambivalent driver of customer sweethearting into account, this paper provides further insight into the occurrence of customer sweethearting, particularly its underlying contrasting psychological mechanisms.

In management research, little is known about how ethno-racial minority leaders interact with similar employees in supervisor–subordinate relationships. This study aims to examine and provide a deeper understanding of individuals’ negative reactions to similar others, thus highlighting the double-edged nature of demographic similarity which has historically predicted positive affective reactions.

Using a survey design, the authors collected data from supervisor-subordinate dyads from multiple companies from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex in Texas, USA. They used ordinary least squares regression and conditional process analysis to test the hypotheses, including a two-stage moderation and moderated mediation.

Incorporating social context, i.e. minority status, as a moderator, the results show that ethno-racial minority leaders supervising ethno-racially similar subordinates were more vulnerable to relationship conflict than non-minority dyads. This, in turn, is linked to a reduction in the leaders’ feelings of trust toward their ethno-racially similar subordinate.

This study draws on social identity theory and status characteristics theory to explain the contradictory processes and outcomes associated with dyadic ethno-racial similarity and suggests the conditions under which dyad racial similarity is connected with unfavorable outcomes. This framework helps to broaden the boundary conditions of relational demography to provide a more nuanced explanation of when and why minority leaders in demographically similar hierarchical dyads experience more relationship conflict, which ultimately diminishes trust.

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate the mechanism which can explain and predict subordinates’ deferential behaviour in China.

Data were collected using mail surveys. The study used two sources of data (supervisor and subordinate) obtained via two separate sets of surveys. In total, 600 questionnaires were distributed to subordinate–supervisor dyads employed in a variety of organizations, and 441 dyad-level questionnaires were collected.

The paper revealed that supervisors’ political mentoring (PM) moderated the strength of the mediated relationships between a supervisor’s trust in the subordinate and the subordinate’s deference to supervisor via supervisor–subordinate guanxi. Furthermore, the direct interaction effect of a supervisor’s trust and PM influenced the subordinate’s deference to supervisor only when the level of PM was low.

This study clarifies the mechanism by which supervisor’s specific behaviours affect subordinate’s deference to supervisor, and explores how supervisor–subordinate dyad creates a reciprocal relationship. The research indicates the unique effect of supervisor’s PM in Chinese organizations, and reinforces the importance of considering supervisor’s trust in the subordinate.

The present research examined the interactive effect of subordinates' and their supervisors' social value orientations (SVO) on abusive supervision and its consequence for in-role performance.

In study 1, we provided a survey to 420 subordinates and 115 supervisors from 42 organizations. HLM was used to test the hypothesized cross-level moderated mediation model. In study 2, 78 participants were asked to imagine they were a supervisor and responded to a potential scenario where supervisor and subordinate prosocial and proself orientations toward the organization were manipulated (2 × 2 design).

Study 1 showed that when supervisors have a higher prosocial motivation, subordinates who are more self-interested (proself) report more abuse than those with a higher prosocial motivation, with negative consequences for in-role performance. Study 2 replicated the pattern: participants (in the role as supervisor) with induced prosocial goals rated abusive supervision behaviors as more justified and acceptable toward a proself employee than they did toward a prosocial employee.

This research is innovative by bridging SVO and organizational literatures and demonstrating that a dyadic interaction between a proself subordinate and a prosocial supervisor may produce a reactive perpetrator – provocative victim relationship characterized by higher abusive supervision.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the double-edged effects of supervisor bottom-line mentality (BLM) on subordinates' work-related behaviors (work performance and knowledge hiding) and the moderating role of subordinate gender.

The theoretical model was tested using a sample of 218 three-wave multi-source data collected from employees of five firms in southern China.

The results revealed that supervisor BLM is positively associated with subordinate BLM. Although subordinate BLM can enhance their work performance, it can also lead to knowledge hiding toward coworkers. Furthermore, these indirect effects are moderated by subordinate gender.

Managers should pay more attention to the potential positive and negative consequences of supervisor BLM and intervene to mitigate the negative impact of BLM.

This study is among the first to examine how supervisor BLM can be a mixed blessing and elicit both positive and negative behaviors from their subordinates. Moreover, by illuminating how subordinate gender moderates the relationship between supervisor BLM and subordinates' work-related behaviors, we enrich and extend the BLM literature.

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the mediating mechanisms of the relationship between supervisor support and pro-environmental behavior. To this end, the quality of the dyadic exchanges between supervisor and subordinates was used.

Data were collected from two different samples. In order to test the present hypotheses hierarchical regression and bootstrapping analysis were conducted.

In congruence with the hypotheses, the results showed that leader-member exchange (LMX) served as a mediator in the relationship between supervisor support and pro-environmental behavior.

Data were drawn using a cross-sectional design. As a result, it is precarious to assess causality among the constructs. Furthermore, both studies collected data from a single source, namely employees, and this may inflate the present relationships due to common method bias.

To the best of author’s knowledge, no prior empirical study has examined the pivotal role of LMX in affecting employees’ pro-environmental behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to fill important gaps by using the attachment theory and examining the effects of supervisors’ early family environment on their behaviors toward subordinates and subordinates’ responses.

The authors used samples of 334 supervisor–subordinate pairs from a manufacturing company.

The study finds that supervisors’ harmonious family environment has a positive influence on subordinates’ responses (job satisfaction, work-to-family enrichment and task performance) through the effect of supervisors’ positive working model and caregiving behavior. On the contrast, supervisors’ conflicting family environment has a negative influence on subordinates’ responses through the effect of supervisors’ negative working model and aggressive behavior.

Existing studies mainly explore the influence of organizational environment on supervisors’ treatment of their subordinates. However, few have examined the relationship between supervisors’ early family environment and their treatment of their subordinates.