Is Authoritarian Leadership Challenge or Hindrance in Nature? It Depends on the Relationship with Supervisor

Received:October 14, 2017  Revised:October 14, 2017

Key Words:  authoritarian leadership, challenge stress, hindrance stress, leader-member exchange, organizational citizenship behavior

Author NameAffiliation
Ying xia0 Harbin Institute of Technology 
Li Zhang0 Harbin Institute of Technology 
Yanhong Chen0 Harbin Institute of Technology 

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Abstract:
      There is controversy about the influence of authoritarian leadership. Some scholars argue that the authoritarian leadership induce negative organizational outcomes as it is one kind of destructive leadership, others propose that it causes non-significant even positive influences. We propose that the two-sided influence of authoritarian leadership can be explained by the dual process of challenge stress and hindrance stress. Further, the influence of authoritarian leadership on organizational citizenship behaviors goes through which pathway depends on the relationship quality between leader and subordinate (i.e., leader-member exchange). Results from 313 employees in China largely supported our proposed research model. We find moderating effect of LMX on authoritarian leadership and work stress, such that when LMX is high, authoritarian leadership has a positive effect on challenge stress and non-significant effect on hindrance stress. The indirect effect through hindrance stress is also moderated by LMX, such that there is a negative indirect effect when LMX is low and non-significant indirect effect when LMX is high. Our research contributes to authoritarian leadership literature by exploring when and how authoritarian leadership influences organizational citizenship behavior through different pathways.

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