The cross-level influence of authoritarian leadership on counterproductive work behavior: A moderated mediation model

Authoritarian leadership is a stressor that stimulates counterproductive work behaviors (CWB) among employees. Based on affective events theory, this study explored how authoritarian leadership affects employees’ targeted CWB and investigated the mediating role of negative affect. Drawing from social comparison theory, we further explored how relative leader-member exchange (RLMX) plays the role in the model. Through a questionnaire survey of 462 respondents from 93 teams in China, we constructed a cross-level moderated mediation model in Mplus to test our hypothesis. The results showed that (1) authoritarian leadership positively predicted employees’ organizational counterproductive work behaviors (CWB-O) but not interpersonal counterproductive work behaviors (CWB-I). Additionally, (2) RLMX positively moderated the relationship between authoritarian leadership and negative affect, and moderated the mediating effect of negative affect. Specifically, authoritarian leadership had a negative but non-significant influence on negative affect at a high level of RLMX. However, the predictive direction and strength of authoritarian leadership on negative affect turned to significantly positive and stronger under the low level of RLMX, which led to an increase in CWB-I and a decrease in CWB-O. The theoretical implications of these findings for advancing the research, the practical approaches to reduce employees’ CWB, and avenues for future research are discussed.