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Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: How and When Machiavellian Leaders Demonstrate Strategic Abuse

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Abstract

The extant literature has largely conceptualized abusive supervision as a hot and impulsive form of aggression. In this paper, we offer a cold and strategic perspective on how abusive supervision might be used strategically to achieve goals. Drawing on the Machiavellian literature and social interaction theory of aggression, we develop a moderated serial mediation model, in which leader Machiavellianism predicts their strategic use of abusive supervision on subordinates via the mediating role of leaders’ guanxi with direct supervisor. We further theorize that this mediation effect is more pronounced when guanxi among team members (team member guanxi, TMG) is stronger, because Mach leaders are more likely to perceive high TMG as a threat to their power. Finally, we propose that Mach leaders’ strategic use of abusive supervision has negative implications for team outcomes, manifested in low levels of team voice and team organizational citizenship behaviors toward fellow team members (OCBI). Analyses of two studies—Study 1 using multi-wave data (355 leaders) from a US sample and Study 2 using a multi-wave, multi-source, and multilevel data (1252 subordinates and 273 leaders) from a Chinese sample—corroborated our model. This study provides a comprehensive examination of who, how, and when strategic abuse unfolds in the workplace and its negative implication for team outcomes.

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Notes

  1. We did not observe any significant conditional indirect effects when using 95% confidence intervals. One possible reason might be insufficient power (which is probably due to many control variables in our model). To increase statistical power, we used 90% confidence intervals.

  2. Following the analyses described in Moshagen et al. (2018), we conducted similar analyses to examine the predictive effects of the dark core (i.e., the overlapping “darkness” shared by the Dark Triad) vs. Machiavellianism without the dark core. In this analysis, each observed item of Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism was modeled to load both on a general factor (representing dark core) that captures the commonalities among all items and on a specific factor (representing a specific dark trait) that captures the remaining covariance among the items belonging to the respective scale that is not due to the dark core. After including dark core in our model, dark core became a stronger predictor than leader Machiavellianism without the dark core alone. Please see detailed results in the Supplementary Material document. We thank an anonymous reviewer for providing this suggestion.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 72102225, 71572076).

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  1. Zhiyu Feng and Fong Keng-Highberger have contributed equally to this article.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

    Zhiyu Feng

  2. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Fong Keng-Highberger

  3. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Kai Chi Yam

  4. University of Washington, Seattle, USA

    Xiao-Ping Chen

  5. School of Business, Nanjing University, 22 Hankou Road, Nanjing, 21000, Jiangsu, China

    Hu Li

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Feng, Z., Keng-Highberger, F., Yam, K.C. et al. Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: How and When Machiavellian Leaders Demonstrate Strategic Abuse. J Bus Ethics 184, 255–280 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05132-y

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