Employee's perceived dark leadership as a mediator of the relationship between leader's dark triad and employee's burnout: A multi level research

The aim of this research was to find out whether there were associations between leader's dark triad and employee's burnout and whether employee's perceived dark leadership mediated these associations. To this purpose, first, a genuine "workplace perceived dark leadership scale" was developed. Throughout the scale development process, three separate studies were conducted. A total of 310, 342, and 355 participants, who work at private security companies, took part in study one, two, and three respectively. The perceived dark leadership scale consisted of three factors: wearisome behaviors, insincere behaviors, and tyrannous behaviors. Following scale development, hypotheses were tested. The sample consisted of 116 leaders and 494 employees who report those leaders. Both leaders and employees work at private security companies. Because the sample comprised two levels (i.e. the individual and group levels), the data were analyzed through hierarchical linear modeling technique. Findings indicated that there were significant associations between leader's wearisome behaviors and employee's exhaustion, cynicism, and professional efficacy, between leader's tyrannous behaviors and employee's exhaustion, cynicism, and professional efficacy, between leader's insincere behaviors and employee's exhaustion and professional efficacy, between leader's machiavellianism and insincere behaviors, between leader's narcissism and wearisome behaviors, between leader's psychopathy and wearisome and tyrannous behaviors, between leader's machiavellianism and employee's professional efficacy, between leader's narcissism and employee's exhaustion, cynicism, and professional efficacy, and between leader's psychopathy and employee's exhaustion. Besides that, leader's wearisome behaviors fully mediated the associations between leader's narcissism and employee's exhaustion, cynicism, and professional efficacy. Moreover, leader's wearisome behaviors partially mediated the association between leader's psychopathy and employee's exhaustion. As distinct from previous studies, in this study, to measure the dark side of leadership a genuine perceived dark leadership scale was developed. In addition to that, as far as is known, in this research, the associations between leader's dark triad and employee's burnout, between leader's dark triad and employee's perceived dark leadership and the mediating role of employee's perceived dark leadership in the associations between leader's dark triad and employee's burnout were explained empirically over a multi level model for the first time. Therefore, it is believed that findings of this research filled an important theoretical gap in the field of management and will be helpful for both researchers and practitioners.