With increasing momentum to hold managers accountable for their failure to act in response to aversive employee experiences, it is critical to develop a conceptual and theoretical understanding of this phenomenon. We introduce perceived employee-directed managerial inaction to capture employees’ perceptions that their manager failed to act in response to an aversive event that they experienced despite a perceived duty or obligation for the manager to do so. Drawing on the fundamental social dilemma, we propose that perceived employee-directed managerial inaction is negatively associated with employees’ perceptions that their manager is trustworthy, which can prompt detrimental outcomes for managers (withdrawal of manager-directed citizenship behavior, resistance behavior, and negative gossip about the manager) as well as for employees (lower psychological well-being). To investigate what perceived employee-directed managerial inaction is as well as why and how it can impact managers and employees, we develop a conceptualization of this construct, validate a measure, and test our theoretical model using an experiment and two multi-wave surveys. Contributions include answering calls to consider the importance of inactive and undesirable event-based responses, conceptually defining perceived employee-directed managerial inaction, and providing a validated measure to stimulate empirical research for this theoretically and practically important phenomenon. We also showcase why and how perceived employee-directed managerial inaction can have negative implications, including how this can inform employees’ generalized perceptions of managers. Overall, we highlight the importance of recognizing that perceived employee-directed managerial inaction is not benign but rather an undesirable response that can negatively impact managers and employees.

Understanding the causes and consequences of varying mental health experiences in the workplace has gained significant research attention, yet little is known about the assumptions people hold about mental health at work, especially with regard to the expectations people may have of their leaders' mental health. Given people tend to romanticize organizational leaders and have expectations regarding prototypical leader attributes, we consider whether people also hold expectations of leaders' mental health. Drawing on implicit leadership theories, we propose that people will expect leaders experience better mental health compared to those occupying other organizational roles (e.g., subordinates). Using mixed methods, Study 1 (n = 85) showed that people expect that those in leadership roles enjoy higher well-being and experience less mental illness than those in non-leadership roles. Using vignettes in which an employee's health was manipulated, Study 2 (n = 200) demonstrated that mental illness is incongruent with leadership prototypes. Using vignettes in which organizational role was manipulated, Study 3 (n = 104) showed that compared to subordinates, leaders are perceived as having more job resources and demands, but people expect that it is leaders' greater access to organizational resources that facilitates their well-being and inhibits mental illness. These findings extend the occupational mental health and leadership literatures by identifying a novel attribute upon which leaders are evaluated. We conclude by considering the consequences of leader mental health expectations for organizational decision-makers, leaders, and employees aspiring to lead.

Although a litany of theoretical accounts exists to explain why mistreatedemployees engage in counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs), little is knownabout whether these mechanisms are complementary or mutually exclusive, or theeffect of context on their explanatory strength. To address these gaps, thismeta-analytic investigation tests four theoretically-derived mechanismssimultaneously to explain the robust relationship between leader mistreatmentand employee CWB: (1) a social exchange perspective, which argues thatmistreated employees engage in negative reciprocal behaviors to counterbalanceexperienced mistreatment; (2) a justice perspective, whereby mistreatedemployees experience moral outrage and engage in retributive behaviors againstthe organization and its members; (3) a stressor-emotion perspective, whichsuggests that mistreated employees engage in CWBs to cope with their negativeaffect; and (4) a self-regulatory perspective, which proposes that mistreatedemployees are simply unable to inhibit undesirable behaviors. Moreover, we alsoexamine whether the above model holds across cultures that vary on powerdistance. Our meta-analytic structural equation model demonstrated that all butthe justice mechanism significantly mediated the relationship between leadermistreatment and employee CWBs, with negative affect emerging as the strongestexplanatory mechanism in both high and low power distance cultures. Given thesesurprising results, as the stressor-emotion perspective is less frequentlyinvoked in the literature, this paper highlights not only the importance ofinvestigating multiple mechanisms together when examining the leadermistreatment-employee CWB relationship, but also the need to develop morenuanced theorizing about these mechanisms, particularly for negative affect.

Due to major work disruptions caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, supervisors in organizations are facing leadership challenges as they attempt to manage “work from home” arrangements, the health and safety of essential workers, and workforce reductions. Accordingly, the present research seeks to understand what types of leadership employees think is most important for supervisors to exhibit when managing these crisis-related contexts and, in light of assertions that women may be better leaders during times of crisis, examines gender differences in how male and female supervisors act and how subordinates perceive and evaluate them in real (Study 1) and hypothetical (Study 2) settings. Results indicate that communal leader behaviors were more important to employees in all three crisis contexts. In Study 1, communality was a stronger predictor than agency of supervisor likability and competence. In Study 2, communality was also more positively related to likability, but agency and communality were equally predictive of competence ratings. Ratings of real supervisors suggest that women were not more communal than men when managing these crises, nor did perceptions of leader behavior differ by supervisor gender in a controlled experiment. However, evaluations of women's competence were more directly related to their display of communal behaviors than were evaluations of male supervisors. This research is helpful practically in understanding effective supervisory leadership during the COVID-19 crisis and contributes to the literature on gender and leadership in crisis contexts by attempting to disentangle gender differences in leader behaviors, perceptions, and evaluations.

Due to the COVID-19 crisis, managers and employees in many organizations suddenly are forced to work from home. Although working from home (WFH) is not a new phenomenon, it is new in its current scale and scope because of COVID-19. Against this background, we investigate the effect of WFH during the COVID-19 crisis on changes in leadership behaviors, and associated changes in perceived manager quality and productivity, at different hierarchical levels in organizations. Based on the literature, we develop two predictions in opposite directions. On the one hand, implementing WFH may force managers to show less direction and control and especially more delegation. On the other hand, research into the effects of exogenous shocks such as COVID-19, suggests that managers may become more controlling and delegate less. Consistent with the first prediction, we find that managers perceive they execute significantly less control and delegate more. Employees also perceive a significant decrease in control, however they perceive on average no change in delegation. Furthermore, and in line with the second prediction, employees of lower-level managers even report a significant decrease in delegation. Finally, our results show that increased delegation is associated with increased perceived productivity and higher manager quality. Together, these results suggest that in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, the effectiveness of WFH might be hampered by the fact that required changes in leadership behaviors, in particular in delegation, are difficult to realize in times of crisis.