Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to social and economic problems and pose a threat to most of enterprise. Faced with crisis and challenge, effective leaders and devoted employees are important factors for enterprises to overcome difficulties. We propose a moderated mediation model wherein narcissistic leader predicts subordinate’s followership through leader self-interest behavior perceived by subordinates, with organizational identification of leader acting as the contextual condition. Two-wave data collected from 303 employees in the manufacturing and technology industry in China supported our hypothesized model. We found that narcissistic leader has negative impact on subordinates’ followership due to their perception of leader’s self-interest behavior. Further, organizational identification of leader plays a moderate role in the relationship between narcissistic leader and subordinates’ followership. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. We also offer several promising directions for future research.
Highlights
The sudden COVID-19 pandemic caught a large number of companies facing crisis, in the uncertain external environment, subordinates hope to have a effective leader who can lead the enterprise to overcome difficulties and thereby enhance their psychological security (Abbas et al, 2021a)
Scholars have found that narcissism plays a positive role in predicting self-interested behavior (Liu et al, 2017), but can the employees perceive the self-interested behavior of the narcissistic leaders and change their attitude and behavior toward the leaders? Few studies have investigated the conduction role of selfinterested behavior that is perceived by subordinates between leadership traits and subordinates’ attitudes and behaviors
The findings of this study show that even if there is no external unfair stimulus, narcissistic leaders still have some self-interested motivation and behavior, and the subordinates’ perception of this kind of self-interested behavior, to some extent, leads to the negative effect of narcissistic leaders on followership
Summary
The sudden COVID-19 pandemic caught a large number of companies facing crisis, in the uncertain external environment, subordinates hope to have a effective leader who can lead the enterprise to overcome difficulties and thereby enhance their psychological security (Abbas et al, 2021a). For companies and leaders, subordinate with high followership is a significant factor for stabilizing organizational performance (Whitlock, 2013). Scholars have found that positive styles of leadership, such as authentic leadership, transformational leadership, charismatic leadership and servant leadership play a positive effect on the followership of subordinates (Miller et al, 2004; Leroy et al, 2015; Abbas et al, 2020, 2021c). Compared with a more certain external environment, individuals with narcissistic traits are more likely to become leaders in the case of uncertainty and show more effectiveness in crisis management (Nevicka et al, 2013; Watts et al, 2013). When a company’s executives are afflicted with narcissism, it can cause the organization to run at a dangerously high level, accelerating or exacerbating its downfall (Wowak et al, 2017)
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