Bad is stronger than good? The role of destructive and constructive leadership for work engagement

Previous work has focused on the role of constructive leadership styles for employee work engagement and exhaustion. We contribute to this literature by investigating the effects on ethical leadership. Moreover, as for many psychological phenomena bad is stronger than good, we examine the relationship of unethical leader behavior, such as perceived toxic leadership, on engagement and exhaustion, highlighting the role of leader-member exchange (LMX) as an underlying process as well as employees’ need for autonomy as a potential boundary condition. For this purpose, we surveyed 311 employees in different professions and tested our model using path analyses in Mplus. As hypothesized, we found that ethical leadership was positively related to work engagement and negatively related to exhaustion, whereas the opposite was the case for toxic leadership. In both cases, these relationships were mediated by LMX. Additionally, we found that employees’ need for autonomy moderated the negative relationship between toxic leadership and LMX, such that this relationship was weaker for employees with a high need for autonomy. Our study contributes to the engagement and leadership literature by shedding light on the effects of ethical and toxic leadership and by emphasizing the influence of employee traits such as need for autonomy in this context. In terms of practical implications, our study shows that organizations should foster ethical leadership and prevent toxic leadership in order to enhance, maintain, and support employee well-being.