Good and Bad Influences: A Meta-Analysis of Leader Behavior on Followers’ Experienced and Perpetrated Deviance

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite the rise in research on leader behaviors and workplace deviance, a comprehensive understanding of the magnitude of associations between the different forms of leader behaviors and workplace deviance is lacking. Drawing on Social Learning Theory and Banks and colleagues’) framework of leader behaviors, our meta-analysis provides a rank ordering of leader behaviors (i.e., moral, inspirational, task-oriented, relational, and passive) based on their importance in predicting workplace deviance using 104 independent samples (N = 42,968). Additionally, we consolidate the literatures on perpetrated and experienced deviance to investigate the association between leader behaviors and deviance from both perspectives. We also assess three boundary conditions that could moderate the leader behavior – workplace deviance relationship. Our findings suggest that passive leader behaviors explain the greatest variance in workplace deviance, followed by moral, relational, inspirational, and task-oriented leader behaviors. We also find support for the moderating effects of deviance target, study design, and rater in(dependence) on the association between leader behaviors and workplace deviance. We highlight that passive leader behaviors exhibit a greater influence on workplace deviance relative to the influence of positive leader behaviors. We discuss the implications of our results for both research and practice.