The mediating role of organizational policy and moral dissolution in the effect of perceived toxic leadership on opportunistic silence

In today's modern world, qualified human resources play an important role in the success of organisations. This resource should be used correctly and efficiently in favour of the organisation. The leadership styles of managers are important in the correct and efficient use of qualified human resources. As a matter of fact, managers' leadership styles can positively or negatively affect employees' effort, motivation, performance and creativity. Managers' oppressive, hurtful, pushing, unappreciative, manipulative or selfish behaviours may increase employees' perceptions of organisational politics, moral dissolution and opportunistic silence tendencies. This situation may cause employees to use the information they have for their own benefit, to act in line with their personal interests, to try to achieve results that are not accepted by the organisation or to try to achieve accepted results in unapproved ways. Although the employees usually know that these behaviours are not right, they can continue their behaviours by justifying the negative behaviours of the managers and they can neutralise mechanisms such as guilt. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to determine the mediating role of organisational politics and moral dissolution in the effect of perceived toxic leadership on opportunistic silence. For this purpose, 500 technical personnel of a state owned thermal power plant were determined as the main population of the research. Data were collected by questionnaire technique from a sample of 227 technical personnel determined by random sampling method. The collected data were analyzed with the help of AMOS and SPSS package programs. According to the results of the analysis, the dimensions of toxic leadership (unappreciation, self-interest, selfishness, negative mental state), which is the independent variable, positively and significantly affect organisational politics, moral dissolution and opportunistic silence. Among the toxic leadership dimensions, it was observed that only the dimension of value ignorance did not have a significant effect on opportunistic silence. Again, according to the results of the analysis, organisational politics and moral dissolution have a significant positive effect on opportunistic silence. According to another analysis result, organisational politics and moral dissolution mediate the relationship between toxic leadership and opportunistic silence.