A cross-cultural view of destructive leadership and followers’ task performance

Abstract

Despite continued scholarly and practitioner interest in destructive leadership, we have an incomplete understanding of why, how, and the extent to which destructive leaders affect their followers’ task performance differently across the various societal contexts in which this relationship is embedded. We remedy this problem by drawing from 69 independent samples of empirical data (k = 69, N = 19,692) to generate a meta-analytic data set that enables us to build and test implicit leadership theory predictions about why GLOBE’s cultural value dimensions moderate the relationship between destructive leadership and followers’ task performance across countries. We extend implicit leadership theory to explain why salient violations of followers’ expectations for leadership behaviors exacerbate or attenuate the relationship between destructive leadership and followers’ task performance. The results demonstrate that GLOBE’s cultural value dimensions meaningfully predict the relationship between destructive leadership and followers’ task performance, especially uncertainty avoidance, power distance, gender egalitarianism, human orientation, and performance orientation cultural value dimensions. Our examination of cross-national differences in violations of implicit leadership theory expectations generates theoretical, empirical, and practical contributions for research and practice.