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Do employees dare to improvise under authoritarian leadership? A conditional indirect effect depending on relationship and task environment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2023

Li Xiong ,
Peng-xiang Nian Open the ORCID record for Peng-xiang Nian [Opens in a new window]  and
Bo Liu
Li Xiong
Affiliation:
School of Economics and Management, Nanchang Institute of Science and Technology, Nanchang, China
Peng-xiang Nian*
Affiliation:
School of Business Administration, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou China
Bo Liu
Affiliation:
School of Foreign Languages, Jiangxi Agricultural University, Nanchang, China
*
Corresponding author: Peng-xiang Nian; Email: npx912013@163.com
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Abstract

To understand the extent to which employees choose to improvise under authoritarian leadership, we applied social information processing theory to examine the mechanisms and boundary conditions of such leadership’s influence on subordinates’ perceptions of managerial intolerance of errors and their improvisation from the perspective of negative leadership. Data from a multi-wave questionnaire survey of 319 frontline teams analysed using SPSS and Mplus revealed that authoritarian leadership can have an inhibitory effect on subordinates’ improvisation due to perceiving managerial intolerance of errors. Even so, the negative mediating effect is significantly weakened by the moderating effect of a leader–member exchange (LMX) relationship and task complexity. That is, when the level of the LMX relationship or task complexity is high, it mitigates authoritarian leadership’s indirect inhibitory effect on subordinates’ improvisation via their perceptions of management’s intolerance of errors.

Keywords

subordinate improvisationauthoritarian leadershipperceived managerial intolerance of errorsleader–member exchange relationshiptask complexity
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Management & Organization , First View , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management

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