Research On The Influence Of Leadership Narcissism On Employees Based On The Agency-interpersonal Framewor

Research has suggested that narcissists find it easy to ascend to leadership roles in organizations because of their confidence,extraversion,and charisma.Given narcissists’ tendency to emerge as leaders in organizations,management scholars are enthusiastic about studying the impacts of narcissistic leaders.However,prior work on leader narcissism,from both bright and dark sides,paints a divergent picture in the field.On the bright side,narcissistic leaders can be “productive” because they are incredibly confident in their abilities,talented in conveying big missions,and willing to take bold risks.On the dark side,given that one of the essential leadership functions is to build and maintain relationships that support communal goals,narcissistic leaders are evaluated as “unproductive” as they encounter serious interpersonal problems when interacting with followers,which were reflected in a low level of follower trust and interactional justice,but a high level of abusive supervision.To date,several approaches have been used to understand the dual nature of leader narcissism,such as:(1)distinguishing different impacts of leader narcissism on different outcomes;(2)theorizing contradictory mediation mechanisms of leader narcissism on outcomes;(3)considering boundary conditions;(4)adopting longitudinal research design;(5)assuming non-linear effects.However,these approaches share at least two critical gaps that have limited their ability to reconcile the mixed findings in leader narcissism research.Firstly,the existing literature lacks a comprehensive and concise theoretical framework to explain the advantages and disadvantages of leader narcissism.Previous studies have proposed a series of theoretical frameworks to explain the circumstances under which leader narcissism can have positive or negative effects.However,the more fundamental question of what are the benefits and drawbacks of narcissistic leaders has not been systematically and clearly answered in theory and empirical research.Secondly,existing research lacks an exploration of the dual-edged impacts of leader narcissism from the perspective of intra-team interactions.Intra-team interaction processes refer to the interactions that occur among team members.In fact,studying the dual-edged impacts of leader narcissism on intra-team interaction processes is crucial.This is because understanding how individuals perceive their relationships with others is a central issue in narcissism.Narcissistic individuals tend to view their relationships with others from a competitive perspective and uphold a self-centered attitude.Considering that leaders can influence the interactions among team members,it can be anticipated that the cognitive aspects of narcissistic leaders related to social interactions(such as focusing on surpassing others and being self-centered)will impact social interactions among team members.Given the above two limitations in reconciling mixed findings in leader narcissism research,the dissertation makes efforts on two fronts.Firstly,this dissertation attempts to establish an agency-communal framework to theoretically clarify the complex effects of leader narcissism on employees.Second,in addition to integrating conflicting findings of leader narcissism from the perspective of leader-subordinate interactions,this dissertation opens up a new perspective to explore the effects of leader narcissism on employees,namely,the perspective of intra-team interactions.Specifically,this dissertation consists of the following three sub-studies.Study 1 attempts to clarify leader narcissism’s positive and negative effects from the perspective of leader-follower interactions.Drawing upon the agency model of narcissism and 11,970 leader samples from 67 independent studies via a meta-analytical approach,Study 1 tests that narcissistic leaders’ extreme confidence in their agentic side will trigger followers’ perceptions of charismatic leader behaviors,and narcissistic leaders’ ignorance in the communal side will shape troubled leader-follower relationships.Furthermore,Study 1 integrates the agentic-communal framework and proposes two offsetting pathways through which leader narcissism elicits effects on distal outcomes.The author proposes a positive pathway between leader narcissism and the three distal outcomes via charismatic leader behaviors and a negative pathway from leader narcissism to distal outcomes via low leader communal effectiveness.In addition,Study 1 also tests how several moderators(cultural individualism,cultural power distance,and leader–follower tenure)may change followers’ evaluations of narcissistic leaders.Study 2,starting from the perspective of intra-team interactions,explores the effects of leader narcissism on two types of team competition,as well as how these two types of team competition will impact team performance and their boundary conditions.As narcissists seek to prevail over others in agentic domains,such as demonstrating their superiority in ability and power,Study 2 proposes that leader narcissism will trigger intra-team performance competition and intra-team power struggle,which then mediate the positive(a tournament mechanism)and negative(a power struggle mechanism)relationships between leader narcissism and team performance,respectively.In addition,Study 2 further explores the contingency factors(e.g.,team industry tenure,team distributive justice climate)that can explain the conditions under which leader narcissism helps or hurts team performance.With 81 team leaders and 352 team members from a two-wave and two-source filed study,study 2 shows a tournament mechanism and a power struggle mechanism of leader narcissism and finds that when narcissistic leaders lead a team composited of employees with relatively low industry tenure,they will achieve higher performance,as the intra-team performance competition triggered by narcissistic leaders will promote team performance.In contrast,when narcissistic leaders lead teams composited of employees with relatively long industry tenure,they will achieve lower performance,as the intra-team power struggles triggered by narcissistic leaders will inhibit team performance.Study 3 also starts from the perspective of intra-team interaction processes to explore whether leader narcissism influences interpersonal behaviors among team members and the underlying mediating mechanisms.Study 3 proposes that leader narcissism disrupts the interpersonal behaviors among team members,manifested as the negative impact of leader narcissism on team organizational citizenship behavior towards colleagues,but a positive impact on team counterproductive behavior towards colleagues.Building upon the literature on team moral emotions,Study 3 further suggests that team perspective-taking norms and team empathy-driven moral emotions(guilt,compassion,moral pride)sequentially mediate the effects of leader narcissism on team interpersonal behaviors.In other words,leader narcissism leads to lower levels of team perspective-taking norms within the team,which subsequently reduces team empathy-driven moral emotions,ultimately decreasing team organizational citizenship behaviors while increasing counterproductive behaviors towards co-workers.Through a two-round survey conducted on 81 teams with leader-subordinate pairings,Study 3identifies the inhibiting effect of leader narcissism on the team interpersonal behaviors and partially supports the mediating role played by team perspective-taking norms and team empathy-driven moral emotions in this process.Combining the findings from the three sub-studies,this dissertation reveals that the beneficial effects of leader narcissism on subordinates primarily stem from the agentic domain of narcissism.Study 1 found that narcissistic leaders,with their extreme self-confidence in the agentic domain,can display charm in their interactions with subordinates,thereby motivating and inspiring them towards a shared vision,ultimately enhancing subordinates’ performance.On the other hand,narcissistic leaders also possess a strong desire to compete with others,which can give rise to both performance competition and power struggles within the teams they lead.Study 2 indicates that when there is a higher proportion of employees with shorter tenure within the team,leader narcissism increases performance competition within the team,thereby contributing to team performance.However,it is important to note that the agentic domain of leader narcissism can still have negative effects on subordinates under certain conditions.For example,when there is a higher proportion of employees with longer tenure within the team,leader narcissism triggers power struggles within the team,negatively impacting team performance.In contrast,this dissertation finds that the harmful aspect of leader narcissism primarily originates from the communal domain of narcissism.Whether viewing from the perspective of leader-subordinate interactions or intra-team interactions,the interpersonal deficiencies of narcissistic leaders have negative consequences.For instance,Study 1 indicates that subordinates’ evaluations of narcissistic leaders on the interpersonal dimension tend to be negative,reflected in lower levels of interpersonal effectiveness ratings.Furthermore,Study 3 reveals that leader narcissism leads to lower levels of team perspective-taking norms,thereby weakening team empathy-driven moral emotions and ultimately negatively impacting interpersonal behavior among team members.Taking together,this dissertation demonstrates the utility of the agentic-communal framework in making sense of the effects of leader narcissism on followers from the perspective of leader-follower and intra-team interactions.