Abstract
Discipline-focused and dominance-focused authoritarian leadership are two different types of authoritarian leadership. While the detrimental effects of authoritarian leadership on employees’ organizational-focused voice have been established in the literature, we have yet to understand the relationships between different types of authoritarian leadership and employees’ self-interested voice. Drawing on uncertainty management theory, this research argues that discipline-focused authoritarian leadership will be negatively related to employees’ self-interested voice via decreased work alienation, whereas dominance-focused authoritarian leadership will be positively related to employees’ self-interested voice via increased work alienation. We also predict that employees’ perceived overqualification will moderate the relations between different types of authoritarian leadership and work alienation. We collected two-wave data from 495 employees and their direct supervisors. Our findings suggest that work alienation mediated the negative relationship between discipline-focused authoritarian leadership and self-interested voice. In contrast, work alienation mediated the positive relationship between dominance-focused authoritarian leadership and self-interested voice. Additionally, the positive relationship between dominance-focused authoritarian leadership and work alienation was enhanced for employees high in perceived overqualification. Our findings suggest managers display more discipline-focused authoritarian leadership than dominance-focused authoritarian leadership to reduce employees’ work deviation and self-interested voice.
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Due to the terms of the permission at the institute, we are not permitted to make the data available to the public. However, the data are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Lou, M., Zhao, H., Ma, C. et al. Discipline vs. dominance: The relationships between different types of authoritarian leadership and employee self-interested voice. Curr Psychol 42, 27927–27941 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03812-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03812-6