Leadership Ostracism Behaviors From the Target's Perspective: A Content and Behavioral Typology Model Derived From Interviews With Chinese Employees

The double-edged sword effects of differential leadership on deviant behavior

Since the beginning of 2020, coronavirus disease has broken out globally, large-scale work and production have stopped, causing employees to experience emotional exhaustion, and home offices have greatly exacerbated employees' deviant behavior. Leadership practices can actively influence employees' workplace behaviors and can prevent employees' passiveness and drain on their mental health. Based on the perspective of attribution theory, this article explores the influence of differential leadership on emotional exhaustion and deviant behavior in internal/external control employees. This survey's subjects were employees working in Tianjin, Beijing, Shanghai. Using the Questionnaire Star, the online platform of the Marketing Research Office of Peking University, and "snowball" methods, 357 questionnaires were collected. This study found that care and communication have no significant effect on deviance. Promotion & rewards significantly reduced interpersonal deviance but had no significant effect on organizational deviance. Tolerance & trust significantly improved interpersonal deviance but had no significant effect on organizational deviance. Employees with a high locus of control (internal control) could more easily control their emotions and reduce interpersonal deviance than employees with a low locus of control (external control) but this had no moderating effect on organizational deviance. The research shows that leaders should regularly care for and encourage each employee within their department, guide employees to recognize the organizational environment, establish an "insider" team, improve work efficiency, and incentivize "outsider" efforts. Subsequent studies can observe and capture employees' emotions and subconscious behaviors through interviews and experiments to ensure the accuracy of the data.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-022-03845-x.

Qualitative Study on the Toxic Triangle Integration of Leadership Ostracism

Leadership ostracism widely exists in all types of organizations, yet specific study regarding this trend is limited. With this study, we explore the influencing mechanisms of leadership ostracism through case interview based on literature analysis and grounded theory. Results show that leadership ostracism is the integration of a triadic interaction process between subordinate performance, leadership characteristics, and organizational environment. Based on Padilla's destructive leadership toxic triangle model, we constructed a toxic triangle model of leadership ostracism. Through comparison, we found that these two triad models overlap in the areas of narcissism and power consciousness of supervisors, the self-concept of subordinates, and the management system of situational factors, indicating that leadership ostracism is itself a type of destructive leadership. In addition, the uniqueness, and differences in leadership ostracism are reflected in the model, including stereotypes, and results orientation of supervisors, political skills, job performance, and cognitive style of subordinates, the power distance, Chaxu climate, and organizational politics of the situational elements. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in the research field that provides prospects for future orientation.