The Effect And Mechanism Of Structural Plateau On Destructive Leadership Behavior

Destructive leadership,which widely spread in the social and organizational management has the detrimental effect on organization and subordinates.Researchers of organizational behavior and leadership has paid much more attention on destructive leadership in recent three decades,however,little research and empirical study deeply explored the antecedents,the predictive mechanism and the boundary condition of the inducing process of destructive leadership.Russell maintained power and glory is the strongest of the human unlimited desire.The main subject of this study is to examine whether leaders who are in the promotion stagnant will take risk of the destructive behavior.The purpose of this study is to investigate the predictive effect of structure plateau on destructive leadership.However,simply examining the relationship between structure plateau and destructive leadership cannot fully provide us a logical theoretical framework and abundant evidence to understanding how destructive leadership happens.It is better to explore the psychological process that how structure plateau affects on destructive leadership and to discover its functional black box.We investigated the mediating effect of distributive justice and psychological contract breach in the relationship between structure plateau and destructive leadership from two theoretical perspective of social comparison theory and social exchange theory.We then explored the boundary condition of the inducing process of destructive leadership based on the perspective of individual characteristics and organizational context.In this empirical study,we conducted a empirical study by collecting questionnaires from supervisor-subordinate dyads.First,our sampling was from large span longitudinal data with 19 enterprises from Beijing,Shanghai,Guangzhou and Harbin,and the questionnaire in dyads with two time nodes.Second,to ensure the rigorous and robust of our results,we evaluated the quality of the 303 samples with the analysis of common method bias,the test of reliability and validity,and examined the effects of demographic variables on destructive leadership.Third,we tested the hypotheses with hierarchical regression analysis by SPSS 17.0 software.The empirical study result shows that : firstly destructive leadership in the Chinese organizational context is a five-factor construct,such as corruption,loss ofmorality,abusive supervision,excoriating subordinate and Laissez-Faire leadership behavior.Secondly,structure plateau has the positive effect on destructive leadership.Thirdly,distributive justice and psychological contract bleach partially mediate the predictive effect of structure plateau on destructive leadership.Finally,motive power,hostile attribution bias and organizational politics perception moderate the relationship between structure plateau and destructive leadership.However,the moderating effect of traditionality between above relationship is not supportive.For the first time,this study investigated the relationship between structure plateau and destructive leadership,and further explored the psychological process of structure plateau effecting on destructive leadership.Discovering its forming mechanism provided the in-depth explanation for the inducing process of destructive leadership in management practice.Second,we discussed the variation of that structure plateau impacts on destructive leadership under different levels of individual characteristics and organizational context.Third,we collected our sampling from multi-resources(sending questionnaires from supervisor-subordinate dyads)to minimize the effect of common method bias to some extend.Fourth,we tested the causal relationship between structure plateau and destructive leadership using large span longitudinal data in order to acquire more rigorous and more robust analysis results.The theoretical contribution of this study is threefold: firstly,examining the predictive effect of structure plateau on destructive leadership enriches the research about antecedents of destructive leadership,attract more attention and deepen our comprehensive understanding in this field;Secondly,exploring the different psychological paths of inducing process for destructive leadership enhances its theoretical explanation;Thirdly,considering its boundary condition with both personal factor and organizational factor on the basis of individual characteristics and organizational context promotes the understanding for the inducing process of destructive leadership.The practical implication of this research is fourfold: first,it promote the understanding of the universality and frequency of destructive leadership as well as to consider the impact of structure plateau in designing the intervention measure for destructive leadership;Second,clarifying the inducing process of destructiveleadership can help organizations to make the psychological intervention and employee assistance program in the organization more specifically;Third,examining the individual characteristics which destructive leaders possess can help organizations exclude those with such traits from the leading position when making promotion decision.Fourth,it can help the organization set an atmosphere where use of power and power supervision are mutual balanced,in order to diminish the breeding possibility of destructive leadership.