Individuals with psychopathic tendencies are sometimes quite capable of acquiring and maintaining leadership positions. One explanation could be that leaders with psychopathic personality profiles “hide behind the mask of sanity” by managing the public display of their emotions so that it positively affects other people's perceptions. We conducted a multisource team study (N = 306 teams) to investigate how leader primary psychopathy and emotion regulation strategies are related to follower perceptions of leader authenticity and follower trust in the leader. We found that leaders with stronger primary psychopathic tendencies would do better to adhere to a strategy of surface acting and refrain from deep acting in order to affect follower trust positively. Perceived authenticity explains the interactive effect of leader emotion regulation and psychopathy on follower trust. We also found that for leaders with higher levels of primary psychopathy deep acting is a less fruitful strategy because they lack the necessary empathic concern, and that the display of naturally felt emotions is a good strategy because it is positively associated with follower trust. We discuss whether the differential use of emotion regulation strategies might explain primary psychopaths’ upward mobility and how their use of emotion regulation strategies could help them to be perceived positively.

Primary psychopathy in leaders, also referred to as successful psychopathy or corporate psychopathy, has been put forward as a key determinant of corporate misconduct. In contrast to the general notion that primary psychopaths’ destructiveness cannot be controlled, we posit that psychopathic leaders’ display of self-serving and abusive behavior can be restrained by organizational contextual factors. Specifically, we hypothesize that the positive relationship between leader primary psychopathy on the one hand and self-serving behavior and abusive supervision on the other will be weaker to the extent that the organizational context (clear rules and policies, sanctionability of misconduct, and transparency of behavior) is stronger. Three studies (one experiment, one survey of leader–subordinate dyads, and one survey of teams) showed that clear rules in particular weakened the positive association between leader primary psychopathic traits and their self-serving and abusive behavior. Explanations for why clear rules rein in primary psychopathic leaders’ destructive behavior more than sanctionability of misconduct and transparency of behavior will be discussed.

Research suggests that the effects of leader narcissism can be complex and context dependent, causing a lack of clarity about the conditions under which leader narcissism affects follower perceptions. We posit that the organizational climate plays an important moderating role in the relationships between leader narcissism, leader self-serving behaviour and follower trust. Based on trait activation theory, we argue that organizational-level cues can spark or smother narcissistic leaders' self-serving behaviour with downstream consequences for followers' trust. Our focus lies on motivational climates in organizations, encompassing both performance climate and mastery climate, as providers of trait-relevant cues. A multilevel and multisource survey of 546 leaders and 1718 followers supports the hypothesized relationships. We find a negative effect of leader narcissism on trust in the leader via leader self-serving behaviour when the performance climate is high (vs. low). We also find a negative effect of leader narcissism on trust in the leader via leader self-serving behaviour when the mastery climate is low (vs. high). We discuss how leader self-serving behaviour as a quintessential behavioural expression of leader narcissism is sensitive to specific cues from the organizational context, how motivational climates help to inform the understanding of leader narcissism, and the practical implications.

As work increasingly transcends organizational boundaries, employee psychological empowerment benefits from resources provided by others outside of the employee's own team, department, or organization. These intergroup collaborations, however, may be inhibited by social identity and social categorization processes, so that the empowerment potential of these relations remains largely untapped. In this study (N = 213), we demonstrate that intergroup leadership is linked to employee psychological empowerment via intergroup relational identification and access to resources. In this way, this study demonstrates the empowering potential of intergroup leadership and intergroup relational identification for employees who collaborate across group barriers. We finish this paper by discussing the main implications for both empowerment and intergroup leadership theory, suggesting fruitful avenues for future research and highlighting the practical value for those who are motivated to increase psychological empowerment among boundary-spanning employees.

Empowering leadership is an important influence on team effectiveness. This makes the question of what the antecedents of team empowering leadership are an important issue to consider. To address this question, we propose a motivated information processing perspective that holds that engaging in empowering leadership is based on social information processing, and that there are individual differences in how elaborate that information processing is. We argue that a key consideration in shifting control from the leader to the team is the extent to which empowering leadership is driven by leaders' consideration of their trust in the team (i.e., an instance of social information processing), and that leader need for closure (a trait capturing the disposition to carefully consider decisions and actions) moderates the relationship between leader trust in team and empowering leadership. A survey ofN = 156 work teams supported these hypotheses.

Gossip is condemned but also ubiquitous and thought to be essential for groups. This triggers the question of which motives explain gossip behavior. Hitherto, negative influence, social enjoyment, group protection, and information gathering and validation are established as motives to gossip. However, venting emotions—discussed as a potentially important motive—has been overlooked empirically. Furthermore, a lack of consensus about a definition of gossip may have affected previous conclusions about gossip motives. This study (N = 460) expands the Motives to Gossip Questionnaire (MGQ; Beersma and Van Kleef, 2012) by including a subscale measuring emotion venting, the desire to share emotionally evocative experiences. To validate the five motives to gossip across definitions, we asked participants to report the most recent gossip event they experienced, randomly assigning them to one of three instructions containing different gossip definitions commonly used in the literature: (1) broad instructions (sharing information about third parties who have no knowledge of the exchanged information), (2) narrower instructions (adding that the shared information must be evaluative), and (3) instructions using the word gossip. After participants recalled and described a gossip event, they completed the 25-item measure of five motives to gossip: social enjoyment, information gathering and validation, negative influence, group protection, and emotion venting. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the five-factor structure. Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis supported full invariance across the three definition conditions. This indicates the Motives to Gossip Questionnaire successfully measures the five dimensions argued to motivate gossip and can be applied in research conceptualizing gossip both narrowly and broadly.

Power is generally valued as it offers access to numerous tangible and intangible benefits. Fear of losing it might therefore initiate behavioral responses aimed at capitalizing on those benefits while it is still possible. Therefore, we propose that leaders' fear of losing power may sway them to engage in self-serving behavior. Moreover, we argue that this effect is particularly strong in environments characterized by competition and rivalry, given that such environments foster opportunistic self-interested behavior. The results of two field studies among organizational leaders and their subordinates (one multi-source dyadic study and one multi-source team study) and a scenario experiment show that fear of power loss is positively related to leader self-serving behavior. As predicted, our results show that this relationship is stronger in more competitive organizational climates. We conclude that the potential effects of (anticipated) power loss deserve more research attention than previously awarded.

We study a population of first year midshipmen within an elite military academy to explore the relationship between individuals’ sociometric status (e.g., status conferrals based on positive interpersonal affect and perceived competence, and status degradations based on negative interpersonal affect) and their attempts to directly control their peers’ behaviour over a year's time. Results show that multiple informal sociometric status hierarchies develop early in the organization's life and remain remarkably stable. Control attempts are driven by these status hierarchies: Lower competence status individuals and those who attract negative status degradations are targeted for control by more people early in the group's life, those relatively free of negative status degradations attempt to control greater numbers of others throughout the group's existence, while higher positive status is generally unrelated to control attempts. However, control attempts do not lead to higher future sociometric status, suggesting they are not status signals. Findings also show that individuals targeted for control by many others leave the organization entirely.

Purpose Organizational change can be a major stress factor for employees. We investigate if stress responses can be explained by the extent to which there is a match between employee self-construal (in personal or collective terms) and change consequences (i.e., does the change particularly have consequences for the individual or for the group). We further investigate if the interactive effect of self-construal and change consequences on stress will be mediated by feelings of uncertainty. Design/Methodology/Approach Data were obtained in three studies. Study 1, a laboratory study, focused on physiological stress . Study 2, a business scenario, focused on anticipated stress . Study 3, a cross-sectional survey, focused on perceived stress . Studies 2 and 3 also included measures of uncertainty in order to test its mediating qualities. Findings Change is more likely to lead to stress when the change has consequences for matters that are central to employees’ sense of self, and particularly so when the personal self is salient. This effect is mediated by feelings of uncertainty. Implications Understanding why some people experience stress during change, while others do so to a lesser extent, may be essential for improving change management practices. It may help to prevent change processes being unnecessarily stressful for employees. Originality/Value This is one of the first studies to show that different kinds of change may be leading to uncertainty or stress, depending on employees’ level of self-construal. The multi-method approach boosts the confidence in our findings.

Previous work has focused on the potential maladaptive consequences of the Dark Triad personality traits (i.e., Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism) in organizational contexts. This research builds upon this work, examining the influence of supervisor position power on the relationship between supervisor Dark Triad traits and abusive supervision in teams. Regression analysis on the data of 225 teams revealed that supervisor Machiavellianism is positively related to abusive supervision in work teams, but only when supervisors perceive their position power to be high rather than low. We discuss how power may function as an amplifier, bringing behavioral consequences of predispositions, emotions and beliefs to the forefront. We also focus on the value of differentiating between the three Dark Triad traits in order to more fully understand how they may relate to the abuse of employees.

Following recent public and scientific discussions on credit provision for entrepreneurs and credit management policies of banks, this study's objective is to examine the effect of personal attitudes of bankers on their willingness to consider credit applications from renascent entrepreneurs. Previously, applications from renascent entrepreneurs were automatically rejected. Recently, more and more banks leave the evaluation of these applications to the bankers themselves. In the current study (n=608) we use an attitudinal perspective to suggest how bankers' entrepreneurial attitudes, their commitment to credit applications, their perceptions of bankruptcy (in terms of stigmatization and learning opportunities), and their past experience with credit provision to renascent entrepreneurs, influence their willingness to consider new credit applications from renascent entrepreneurs. Overall, results show that individual bankers extensively determine renascent entrepreneurs' access to financial capital. Implications for banks' credit provision policy toward renascent entrepreneurs, and for theory, and suggestions for future research are provided in the conclusion and discussion.

We examined the interactive effects of leader group prototypicality, accountability, and team identification on team-oriented behavior of leaders, thus extending the social identity perspective on leadership to the study of leader behavior. An experimental study (N = 152) supported our hypothesis that leader accountability relates more strongly to team-oriented behavior for group nonprototypical leaders than for group prototypical leaders. A multisource field study with leaders (N = 64) and their followers (N = 209) indicated that this interactive effect is more pronounced for leaders who identify more strongly with their team. We discuss how these findings further develop the social identity analysis of leadership.

Research on psychological empowerment consistently shows positive relations between empowerment and work-related outcomes like organizational performance, making empowerment a key issue for both scholars and practitioners in the field of management and organizational behavior. Since the 80s, organizations largely switch from hierarchical to more boundary spanning network-based structures and empowerment theory has not been adjusted to this transformation. We present a model that explains how,(a) social networks (instrumental, primary, internal and external) affect the psychological empowerment of employees, (b) employees play an active role in their empowerment process when (deliberately) directing their social networks, (c) behavioral consequences of initial levels of psychological empowerment affect future levels of psychological empowerment, and (d) ‘relational leadership’ – leadership focusing on relations between employees or organizational groups – can be a mean to direct employees in the formation of social networks that are contributive to their level of psychological empowerment.