Research On The Impact Of Authoritarian Leadership On Organizational Citizenship Behavior From The Enhancing-depleting Perspective

Mixed findings on the association between authoritarian leadership and organizational outcomes have been reported.Some scholars found that authoritarian leadership is a type of destructive leadership,which exhibits negative influences on employees' job performance.For example,studies found that authoritarian leadership has negative impact on employees' job performance and organizational citizenship behavior(i.e.,OCB).However,other studies found that authoritarian leadership may sometimes exhibit positive influences.Some ealier studies reported by Cheng and Farh found that authoritarian leadership has positive impact on employees' compliance and organizational identification.Some following studies also found positive effect of authoritarian leadership on employees' performance.Based on these inconsistent conclusions,this study proposed the dual-faces nature of authoritarian leadership,and suggested that authoritarian leadership has both benefiting and depleting effects on employees' OCB.As the two opposite effects compensate with each other,this study propose that the main relationship between authoritarian leadership and organizational citizenship behavior is not significant.According to cognitive-affective process framework,this study proposed the two-stage mediating model to explain the relationship between authoritarian leadership and organizational citizenship behavior.The two stages are divided into cognitive stage and process stage.During the cognitive stage,this study considered challenge stress and hindrance as the mediator s,and leader-member exchange as the moderator to build a moderated mediating model.In the process stage,this study proposed that authoritarian leadership had positive relationship with self-efficacy and ego depletion.that is,self-efficacy and ego depletion are considered as the mediators in the relationship between authoritarian leadership and organizational citizenship behavior.Uncertainty avoidance has been considered as the moderator of the process stage.To combine the cognitive stage and process stage,this study proposed the beneficial and depleting paths between authoritarian leadership and organizational citizenship behavior.Among them,beneficial path is linked by challenge stress and self-efficacy,and depleting path is linked by hindrance stress and ego depletion.Moreover,this study proposed the multi-mediating effcts with moderators,including leader-member exchange and uncertainty avoidance.This study adopted experiment method and survey method to test our research model.336 employees from two enterprises in Mainland China were invited to participate in our survey study,and 145 students from Hong Kong were invited to participant in our experiment study.This study used one-way ANOVA and Hierarchical Multiple Regression method to analys e the main effect,mediating effects,moderating effects,moderated mediating effect,multi-mediating effect,and moderated multi-mediating effects in our research model.The results showed that in the cognitive stage,employees who worked with authoritarian leader perceived more challenge stress and hindrance stress,and challenge/hindrance stress played the mediating effects in the relationship between authoritarian leadership and organizational citizenship behavior.This study also found that leader-member exchange played the moderating effect in the relationship between authoritarian leadership and challenge/hindrance stress.When leader-member exchange is high,the relationship between authoritarian leadership and challenge stress is lower compared wit h the relationship when leader-member exchange is low.Leader-member exchange buffered the negative influence of authoritarian leadership on hindrance stress.the moderated mediating results showed that leader-member exchange moderated the indirect effect via challenge stress,that is,authoritarian leadership was positively related to organizational citizenship behavior via challenge stress when leader-member exchange is low,and authoritarian leadership was not significantly related to organizational citizenship behavior via challenge stress when leader-member exchange is low.In the process stage,employees work with authoritarian leaders perceive more self-efficacy and ego depletion simultaneously,which influence organizational citizenship behavior further.Ego depletion,rather than self-efficacy played as the mediator among the relationship between authoritarian leadership and organizational citizenship behavior.Uncertainty avoidance played as a moderator among the relationship between authoritarian l eadership and self-efficacy.That means,when employees' uncertainty avoidance is high,authoritarian leadership is positively related to employees' self-efficacy.However,authoritarian leadership is negatively related to employees' self-efficacy when uncertainty avoidance is low.The moderated mediation test results showed that authoritarian is positively related to organizational citizenship behavior via self-efficacy only when uncertainty avoidance is high.The multi-mediators testing results showed that authoritarian leadership can be positively related to organizational citizenship behavior via the mediating effects of challenge stress and self-efficacy.At the same time,authoritarian leadership can be negatively related to organizational citizenship behavior via the mediating effects of hindrance stress and ego depletion.This study also tested the multi-mediating by considering the moderators in the model.The interaction between authoritarian leadership and LMX is related to organizational citizenship behavior via beneficial path.The three way interation of authoritarian leadership,leader-member exchange and uncertainty avoidance is related to organizational citizenship behavior via both beneficial and depleting paths.Based on the above analyses,this study discussed the potential implications from theoretical and practical perspectives.To be specific,this study proposed the solutions such as correctly identifing the authoritarian leadership style,distinguishing other kinds of job stressors in the organization,creating good relationship with leaders,enhancing self-efficacy,avoiding ego depletion,and reasonably reducing the uncertainties in organization to enhance employees' organizational citizenship behavior and to ensure the smoothing ope ration in organization.