Abstract
Introduction
Method
Results
References
Abstract
Purpose – The paper aims to clarify the relationship between exploitative leadership (EL) and organizational cynicism (OC). Besides, it aims also to examine the mediating role of emotional exhaustion (EE) underpinning this relation. Design/methodology/approach – The data were collected by a questionnaire from 491 employees, who work in four telecom firms. Findings – The paper provides empirical insights about how EL influenced OC; it suggested that EE fully mediated the positive relationship between EL and OC. Originality/value – To the author’s knowledge, it is the first study to address the relationship between exploitative leadership and organizational cynicism. In addition, it is the first one to explore the mediating mechanism of emotional exhaustion underpinning this relation.
Introduction
Leaders represent their organizations, and their activities are frequently linked to their subordinates’ actions (Aquino et al., 1999; Jiang et al., 2017). In management literature, leadership has a special interest (Terzi and Derin, 2016); this can be referred to as the “leaders’ lure” power to get their subordinates to perform in a certain way freely (Terzi and Derin, 2016). The process of influencing an organized group’s activities toward the fulfilment of a task has been termed as leadership (Chemers, 1997; Jiang et al., 2017). Leadership has traditionally been associated with power and influence, which may sometimes be detrimental to teams, organizations and followers (Wang et al., 2020). Exploitative leadership (EL) is classified as destructive leadership since these leaders engage in a variety of undesirable actions (Schmid et al., 2019; Majeed and Fatima, 2020). “Leadership with the primary goal of furthering the leader’s self-interest through exploiting others” is how EL is characterized (Schmid et al., 2019, p. 1,426; Guo et al., 2020). Exploitative leaders may take advantage of people by engaging in true egoistic behaviors such as challenging subordinates, taking credit, influencing subordinates and applying pressure (Schmid et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2020).
Past literature has demonstrated several negative consequences of EL including reduced affective commitment and job satisfaction, raised burnout, turnover intention, realized imbalance in social exchange and workplace deviance (Schmid et al., 2018, 2019; Guo et al., 2020; Pircher Verdorfer et al., 2019).