Deviant Followers Across Cultures: An Investigation of Destructive Leadership, Workplace Deviance, and National Context

Abstract

Despite continued scholarly and practitioner interest in destructive leadership, the field has an incomplete understanding of the relationship between destructive leadership and followers’ workplace deviance, especially with regard to how this relationship manifests differently across cultures. Drawing on implicit leadership theory and the target similarity model of social exchange, my dissertation examines the moderating effects of the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness’ (GLOBE’s) cultural value dimensions of performance orientation, assertiveness, future orientation, humane orientation, institutional collectivism, in-group collectivism, gender egalitarianism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance on the relationships between destructive leadership and followers’ interpersonal and organizational deviance across national contexts. My study utilizes a meta-analytic database of primary studies for the relationships between destructive leadership and interpersonal deviance (k = 91; N = 28,616), as well as destructive leadership and organizational deviance (k = 59; N = 20,752) to test the hypotheses. Ultimately, my study meaningfully extends theory, adds nuance to our knowledge on the impact of cultural context, and improves evidence-based recommendations for practice.