The effect of destructive leadership on job stress and employee turnover: A research on gendarmerie staff resigned from their institution

Human beings, which are a social being, have been tended to live in groups and communities ever since they have existed. As an inevitable consequence of this situation, the need for management of groups and communities has been emerged and mostly the strongest members in a community have taken over this task as leaders. A good leader plays a key role in achieving the goal of the community, motivates the followers around him/her for the determined goals and guides them to success. However, a bad leader is the biggest obstacle in front of the community to achieve its goals. Such leaders can lead their followers to great disasters as well as themselves. Particularly in recent years, interest in the perceived negative aspect of leadership has increased and researchers have begun to conduct researches on different forms of bad leadership. In this study, it is aimed to reveal the relationship between destructive leadership behavior, job stress and job quitting behavior. Within the scope of the study, data were obtained from 309 participants who were reached by snowball sampling method and resigned from their institution while they were working as gendarmerie staff. In addition to reliability, validity, exploratory factor and correlation analyzes of the scales used in the study, regression analysis was applied to test the research hypotheses. The reached results have demonstrated that general perceived destructive leadership and its sub-dimension of the inability to deal with new technology and other changes and its sub-dimension of the nepotism (favoritism) affect perceived stress positively and significantly; general perceived destructive leadership and only its sub-dimension of the nepotism (favoritism) affect job quitting behavior positively and significantly as well. In addition, the existence of a low positive and significant relationship between perceived stress and job quitting behavior has been revealed.