Department of Developmental, Personality and Social Psychology, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, B-9000, Ghent, Belgium.
NUS Business School, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore.
Sci Rep. 2022 Nov 30;12(1):20676. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-24882-3.
The leadership role can be demanding and depleting. Using self-regulation and social exchange theory as a framework, we developed a three-step sequential mediation model that explains how feelings of depletion can degrade leaders' own performance level, via the reciprocating behavior of their employees. Specifically, we hypothesized that leader depletion is negatively related to their trust beliefs. This lack of trust is expected to be reciprocated by employees in such a way that they display less citizenship behaviors towards their leader. These lowered citizenship behaviors are, in turn, predicted to negatively impact leader performance. Additionally, we hypothesized that these negative effects of feeling depleted are more pronounced for leaders who believe that their willpower is limited. Studies 1 and 2 illustrated that leader depletion indirectly influences their own performance level through leaders' trust beliefs and employees' leader-directed citizenship behaviors. Study 3 extended these findings from the inter-individual to the intra-individual level, and demonstrated the predicted moderating role of belief in limited willpower. Together, our studies provide new and useful insights in the broader, more distal implications of leader depletion, which have not yet been considered in existing self-regulation models.
领导角色可能要求很高且耗费精力。本研究以自我调节和社会交换理论为框架，提出了一个三阶段序列中介模型，用以解释枯竭感如何通过员工的互惠行为降低领导者自身的绩效水平。具体而言，我们假设领导枯竭感与他们的信任信念呈负相关。预计员工会以这种方式对这种缺乏信任进行回应，即他们对领导表现出较少的公民行为。这些降低的公民行为反过来又预计会对领导绩效产生负面影响。此外，我们假设，对于那些认为自己意志力有限的领导者来说，这种枯竭感的负面影响更为明显。研究 1 和 2 表明，领导者枯竭感通过领导者的信任信念和员工对领导的公民行为，间接地影响他们自身的绩效水平。研究 3 将这些发现从个体间水平扩展到个体内水平，并证明了对有限意志力信念的调节作用。总之，我们的研究为领导者枯竭感的更广泛、更遥远的影响提供了新的有用见解，而这些影响在现有的自我调节模型中尚未得到考虑。
