Passionate Leaders Behaving Badly: Why Do Leaders Become Obsessively Passionate and Engage in Abusive Supervision?

While extant passion research has predominantly highlighted the benefits of work passion, such passion may also have a dark side and provoke negative behaviors that harm others. This work examines abusive supervision as an outcome of leaders' obsessive work passion, and explores leaders' importance of performance to self-esteem (IPSE) as an antecedent of such passion. We test our predictions across two studies. In an initial test of whether leaders' obsessive passion (OP) is predicted by their IPSE and predicts abusive supervision, Study 1 employs a time-lagged sample of leader-subordinate dyads and examines abusive supervision as reported by subordinates. Study 2 expands on the model by incorporating two components of burnout, exhaustion, and disengagement, as explanatory mechanisms linking leader OP to abusive supervision as reported by supervisors. Overall, we find that high-IPSE leaders are more likely than their low-IPSE counterparts to develop obsessive work passion, which then contributes to their exhaustion and disengagement, ultimately resulting in higher abusive supervision. Implications for work passion research are discussed.