Individuals with psychopathic tendencies are sometimes quite capable of acquiring and maintaining leadership positions. One explanation could be that leaders with psychopathic personality profiles “hide behind the mask of sanity” by managing the public display of their emotions so that it positively affects other people's perceptions. We conducted a multisource team study (N = 306 teams) to investigate how leader primary psychopathy and emotion regulation strategies are related to follower perceptions of leader authenticity and follower trust in the leader. We found that leaders with stronger primary psychopathic tendencies would do better to adhere to a strategy of surface acting and refrain from deep acting in order to affect follower trust positively. Perceived authenticity explains the interactive effect of leader emotion regulation and psychopathy on follower trust. We also found that for leaders with higher levels of primary psychopathy deep acting is a less fruitful strategy because they lack the necessary empathic concern, and that the display of naturally felt emotions is a good strategy because it is positively associated with follower trust. We discuss whether the differential use of emotion regulation strategies might explain primary psychopaths’ upward mobility and how their use of emotion regulation strategies could help them to be perceived positively.

Servant leadership's positive effects on employee attitudes and motivations are well-documented. However, it remains unclear how and whether the employee beneficiaries of servant leadership choose to remain and thrive with their current employer. Would employees remain with employers and advance within their organizations after exposure to servant leadership, or is it possible that the advantages gained make them more inclined to explore better opportunities elsewhere? We examine this question from a social learning perspective by investigating the process through which an employee's experience of servant leadership behaviors influences their voluntary turnover and promotion attainment. We propose a serially mediated model in which an employee's perception of servant leadership increases promotion attainment while reducing voluntary turnover via perceptions of two psychological climates (caring and instrumental) and subsequent changes in employee career progression expectations. These predictions were tested in a 4-wave field study in which objective measures of turnover and employee promotions were tracked throughout a 12-month period. The results reveal support for the hypothesized serial mediation model. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this research and outline directions for future research.

Over the past two decades, interest in collective approaches to leadership has grown, with recent viewpoints arguing that shared leadership (SL) is a more powerful predictor of performance than vertical leadership. Despite a surge in SL research, however, little is known about the patterns of leadership that emerge within teams, when members perform leadership collectively. The purpose of this article is to address this gap, by exploring how team members share the leadership space in different contexts. Adopting a longitudinal qualitative perspective, this article explores the predominant patterns of SL that emerged in five organizational teams in Ireland, over the period of a year. Grounded in social exchange theory, insights are gained through multiple case studies in authentic organizational settings, using critical incident technique, participant diaries, and semi-structured interviews. Significantly, the predominant patterns of SL which emerged were not the same in all contexts, and five distinct forms are identified including withdrawal, specialization, rotation, simultaneous enactment, and centralization of leadership behaviors. The findings advance our understanding of SL by identifying and connecting different forms of SL arrangements with underlying contextual and relational conditions.

In this article, we integrate social exchange theory with insights from contingent self-esteem to explain why leader transparency (LT) might not always be reciprocated by enhanced follower voice. We theorize that when leaders are transparent, they initiate a social process that offers the exchange of honesty by signaling that the work environment is psychologically safe enough for followers to express their opinions in return. Yet, for individuals whose self-esteem fragilely relies on the approval of others (i.e., self-esteem based on others’ approval), reciprocating transparent communication is more difficult because speaking up exposes their self-worth to the potential for rejection. We test our model at the individual and team level. In Study 1 (individual level), we find that LT is positively related to follower self-rated voice one-month later through enhanced follower psychological safety, but only when follower self-esteem based on others’ approval is low as opposed to high. In Study 2 (team level), we find that team LT is positively related to leader-rated team voice six-months later through team psychological safety; however, only when team level self-esteem based on others’ approval is low, but not high. These results underscore that leader transparency can be reciprocated with enhanced follower voice, but only when followers have secure and stable self-esteem.

Many innovative products are attributable to employees disobeying the mandate of their supervisors to stop working on a creative idea, that is, creative deviance. Surprisingly, there has been a dearth of empirical research on this important construct, and the possible negative social outcomes of creative deviance remain unexplored. This research integrates psychological ownership theory and motivated information processing theory to theoretically delineate psychological ownership as an antecedent of creative deviance. We further explore social undermining as a negative outcome of creative deviance and investigate the leader–member exchange (LMX) as a boundary condition of the association between creative deviance and social undermining. In a series of three studies, we validate an existing scale for creative deviance, and utilize multiple methods to test our full moderated-mediation model. Findings suggest that creative deviance partially mediates the relationship between psychological ownership and experienced social undermining and LMX attenuates the relationship between creative deviance and experienced social undermining. Our research has important theoretical and practical implications as it explores the darker sides of creative deviance.

Despite the extensive interest in abusive supervision, there remains conceptual ambiguity surrounding it, specifically concerning the overlap between leaders’ actions and subordinates’ perceptions. Drawing from leadership categorization theory, we propose that authoritarian leadership activates subordinates’ anti-prototype of leaders and perceptions of more abusive supervision. Moreover, such a relationship is moderated by subordinates’ ideal and typical leadership schema, with the former representing individual preference and the latter representing the social norm. Using an experiment ( N = 344) and a multi-wave field study ( N = 249), we found that subordinates holding high ideal leadership prototypicality (e.g., my ideal leader is sensitive) and low typical leadership anti-prototypicality (e.g., other leaders are domineering) perceive more leadership anti-prototypicality and more abusive supervision when faced with authoritarian leadership. Our research enriches the existing literature on leadership by providing a cognitive perspective that explains how subordinates’ implicit leadership schemas play a role in the leadership perception process.

Core to the social identity theory of leadership is leader group prototypicality (LGP), the perception of the leader as embodying shared collective (e.g., team, organization) identity. Steffens, Munt, van Knippenberg, Platow, and Haslam’s meta-analysis showed that LGP operationalized as embodying the ideal-type of the group (ideal-type prototypicality, ITP) is more strongly related to indicators of leadership effectiveness than LGP operationalized as embodying the average group member (average member prototypicality, AMP). However, to support these conclusions Steffens et al. could rely only on between-study comparisons based on coding of LGP operationalizations. It is therefore possible that AMP versus ITP operationalizations covaried with other study differences. To address this issue, we conducted two replication tests relying on within-study comparisons. A scenario experiment and a survey focused on the relationship of both operationalizations of LGP with what in the social identity theory of leadership is a proximal outcome of LGP: trust in the leader. Replicating Steffens et al.'s finding, both studies showed that LGP is more strongly related to trust when it is operationalized as ITP rather than AMP.

Although prior research has shown that reward provision might sometimes increase creativity, little is known about how leadership that clarifies effort-reward contingencies (i.e., contingent reward leadership) is related to team creativity. Drawing on the theory of learned industriousness, we argue that contingent reward leadership can enhance team knowledge exchange and, in turn, team creative performance. However, we propose that this relationship is moderated by leader unpredictability, which can create uncertainty about resource allocation, thereby undermining the otherwise positive effect of contingent reward leadership. In a two-source, lagged design (three-wave) field study with data from 60 organizational teams, we found a conditional indirect (moderated mediation) effect of contingent reward leadership on team creative performance through team knowledge exchange. This conditional indirect effect was positive when leader unpredictability was low, and negative when leader unpredictability was high. Our research provides leaders with clear and actionable advice by showing that contingent reward leadership promotes team creative performance only when leaders act in predictable and consistent ways.

Bullying is an adverse workplace phenomenon that requires serious attention by leaders and managers. Drawing upon Social Identity Theory, Optimal Distinctiveness Theory, and Victim Precipitation Theory, this study investigates how inclusive leadership is associated with workplace bullying (WB). It also examines the mediating role of psychological safety and self-esteem as serial mediators in this relationship. Additionally, the moderating role of embeddedness on the link between inclusive leadership and WB is explored. The study used a two-wave time-lagged survey completed by 226 full-time employees. The survey captured employees’ perceptions about themselves, their work environment, and their line managers. Study hypotheses were tested through structural equation modeling. Study findings revealed that inclusive leadership is negatively related to WB. We also found support for the serial mediation of psychological safety and self-esteem in the link between inclusive leadership and WB. Our study also demonstrates that the negative relationship between inclusive leadership and WB is weaker for employees with high embeddedness, thereby uncovering the less explored dark side of embeddedness.

The development of a leader identity is considered essential for leadership success. Underlying this identity work is the belief that the social identity of being a leader is positive—something that leaders both privately endorse and want publicly conferred by others. However, this process is complex for women leaders who are simultaneously navigating the identity work of being women in male-dominated leadership positions. We conducted a qualitative investigation of women in senior leadership roles to examine how they construct a leader identity by managing private and public endorsements of both a leader and a female identity. Our results indicate that women leaders engage in leader and gender identity work whereby they actively manage how they privately self-endorse and publicly allow others to endorse their leader and female identities using identity hybridization. In so doing, they mix and recombine elements of both their leader and gender identities to construct a coherent female leader identity. Doing so allows them to benefit from the complementarity of these identities, while mitigating the risks associated with publicly and privately endorsing these two identities in tandem. This approach to identity hybridization allows women leaders to maintain a sense of agency, effectiveness, and authenticity in the face of identity tensions.