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Ingratiating with Despotic Leaders to Gain Status: The Role of Power Distance Orientation and Self-enhancement Motive

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Abstract

This study adds to business ethics research by investigating how employees’ exposure to despotic leadership might influence their peer-rated workplace status, along with a mediating role of ingratiatory behavior targeted at supervisors and a moderating role of their power distance orientation and self-enhancement motive. Multisource, three-wave data from employees and their peers in Pakistani organizations reveal that exposure to despotic leaders spurs employees’ upward ingratiatory behavior, and this behavior in turn can help them attain higher status in the organization. The mediating role of upward ingratiatory behavior also is more prominent among employees with higher levels of power distance orientation and self-enhancement motive. For business ethics scholars, this study thus pinpoints a potentially dangerous pathway—featuring employees’ deliberate efforts to impress self-centered, destructive supervisors—by which despotic leadership can generate beneficial outcomes for employees but not for the organization, as well as how this process varies due to key personal characteristics.

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Notes

  1. We have no a priori reason to believe that despotic leadership exerts fundamentally different effects on any of the subdimensions of ingratiatory behavior, but we also conduct a post hoc analysis, and report the findings in the “Results” section, that confirms the validity of our approach.

  2. As noted subsequently, the empirical context of this study is the power-distant country of Pakistan. Previous research acknowledges wide variation among individuals within a particular country, in terms of their power distance orientation (Kirkman et al. 2009; Lian et al. 2012). The question of how this personal factor, together with a self-enhancement motive, might trigger upward ingratiatory behavior and subsequent workplace status in response to despotic leadership thus might be particularly relevant for our study context but should be informative in other countries too.

  3. Consistent with our theoretical framework, the tested model included the moderating effects of power distance orientation and self-enhancement motive on the relationship between despotic leadership and upward ingratiatory behavior, but not between upward ingratiatory behavior and workplace status. A post hoc test confirmed that power distance orientation and self-enhancement motive did not significantly influence the latter relationship.

  4. The positive relation of exposure to despotic leadership with all four subdimensions of upward ingratiation contrasts with Kacmar et al.’s (2004) conceptual argument that low quality leader relationships should relate positively to self-focused but not other-focused ingratiatory behaviors. Perhaps in a power-distant country such as Pakistan, employees are less likely to be offended by the presence of despotic leadership, so they find it appropriate to go out of their way to appease leaders with various ingratiatory behaviors, irrespective of their specific nature.

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  1. Goodman School of Business, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, L2S 3A1, Canada

    Dirk De Clercq

  2. Small Business Research Centre, Kingston University, Kingston-Upon-Thames, UK

    Dirk De Clercq

  3. Faculty of Management Sciences, International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Tasneem Fatima

  4. Business (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences), Memorial University of Newfoundland (Grenfell Campus), Corner Brook, Newfoundland, A2H5G5, Canada

    Sadia Jahanzeb

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De Clercq, D., Fatima, T. & Jahanzeb, S. Ingratiating with Despotic Leaders to Gain Status: The Role of Power Distance Orientation and Self-enhancement Motive. J Bus Ethics 171, 157–174 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04368-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04368-5

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