Enough is enough! The impact of core self-evaluation on the despotism-outcome relationship

Abstract

Recently, there has been a surge of studies on the dark side of leader behaviors. The current research builds around newly emerging leadership in this line of inquiry – despotism. Indeed, the detrimental impact of despotic leadership on employee attitudes and behaviors is congenital. However, there is yet limited understanding of the conditions under which the magnitude of such negative influence systematically changes. To extend, 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 dyadic data demonstrated that despotic leadership is negatively associated with subordinates’ task performance and knowledge sharing behaviors, and the relationships are channeled through degrading quality of leader-member exchange (LMX). Most conspicuously, the self-verification view of CSE regarding the despotism-outcome link indeed received strong support. By identifying the deadly combination, we uniquely add to the current discourse. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our research.