Do leaders' hierarchical perceptions matter? A social dominance theory perspective of empowering leadership, abusive supervision, and team performance

Leaders typically operate within an organizational structure that often puts them in a hierarchically superior position over subordinates. Despite this ubiquitous arrangement, there has been little attention on leaders' overall beliefs about hierarchical relationships and how these beliefs affect leader behavior and team functioning. Specifically, more research is needed on how leaders' orientations, such as dominance and power orientations, affect leadership styles and outcomes. I address this gap by examining how leaders' hierarchical perceptions affect their leadership behaviors, and ultimately team performance. In this study, I explore the effects of leaders' social dominance orientation (SDO) and power distance orientation (PDO) on their empowering leadership and abusive supervision behaviors directed toward their teams. Utilizing social dominance theory as a theoretical framework, I propose that leaders' SDO will be positively related to their abusive supervision, and SDO and PDO will be negatively related to their empowering leadership of their teams. I also predict that leaders' leader self-efficacy will interact with SDO, and followers' team-level PDO will interact with leaders' PDO, in influencing these leadership behaviors. I then examine moderated mediation models, and test how the proposed interactions and leadership behaviors ultimately impact team performance. To test my hypotheses, I collected multi-source data with 52 teams in the physical therapy industry. I found that teams' PDOs moderated the relationship between leader PDO and empowering leadership, such that higher levels of empowering leadership occurred as the teams had more congruent PDOs to the leaders. Post-hoc analyses also revealed that leader self-efficacy moderated this effect, such that leader self-efficacy had both positive and negative effects on empowering leadership depending on team and leader PDO congruence. The post-hoc results also revealed that leader gender qualified the relationships between leader SDO and leadership behaviors, with differing effects for male and female leaders, and the gender make-up of the subordinate team was also relevant to abusive supervision. Taken together, the research contributes to our understanding of leadership behavior by beginning to integrate social dominance theory with leadership theory, and offers a number of promising avenues for future theoretical development and research.