When is Authoritarian Treatment Less Harmful to Employee Trust? From A Social Contextual Leadership

Abstract

Authoritarian leadership (AL) can harm the social exchange relationship between leaders and followers. However, it matters a lot how followers interpret a leader’s treatment. Drawing on implicit leadership theory and the contextual leadership perspective, we examined three discrete social contexts in which coworkers experienced authoritarianism, manager authoritarian behavior, and a supportive organizational climate, affecting employees’ expectations toward leader authoritarianism to influence their reactions toward AL. Using a dataset of 311 employees in 99 teams in Study 1, results showed that when coworkers experienced high authoritarianism from their supervisor, and when managers demonstrate high authoritarian behavior, an authoritarian supervisor is less detrimental to employees’ affective trust, which is less harmful to their task and organization performance. In Study 2, using a sample of 3,058 employees from 19 companies, we demonstrated how a supportive organizational climate affects employees’ reactions to AL. Using multilevel path modeling, we found that an authoritarian supervisor is more harmful to employees’ affective trust and their organizational performance when there is a high-level supportive climate. Our study contributes to the leadership literature by showing how the discrete work context affects employees’ leadership expectations and reactions to leader treatment.