Saturday 25 July 08:15
- 09:45
Hall: 24 - Room 3 SPT
Chair and Presenter:
Pico Lara
Discussant:
Neves Pedro
Division: Division 1: Work and Organizational Psychology
Organizations are increasingly confronted with destructive leadership behaviors that systematically undermine employee well-being, organizational effectiveness, and ethical climates. This symposium presents five complementary studies from three different countries (Canada, Germany, and Portugal) that advance our understanding of how various forms of problematic leadership create uncertainty, stress, and dysfunction across organizational contexts. Using multiple theoretical frameworks (e.g., Uncertainty Reduction Theory, Affective Events Theory, Cognitive-Affective-Behavioral-Trait) and diverse methodological approaches—experimental designs, longitudinal studies, critical incident techniques, and multi-source assessments—the set of presentations provides robust empirical evidence for the mechanisms through which leaders inadvertently or deliberately create dysfunctional workplace dynamics. The symposium discusses inconsistent and exploitative leadership behaviors and highlights important leader-follower perceptual discrepancies, showing that reluctant leaders may remain unaware of their destructive behaviors, while followers readily identify these patterns and associate them with passive and inconsistent leadership. Additionally, research on paradoxical leadership situations reveals anxiety as a predominant leader emotion, with systematic differences in emotional experiences between leaders and followers during challenging scenarios. Collectively, these studies offer context-specific insights for organizational interventions. For remote work environments, organizations should prioritize strengthening organizational identification and monitoring exploitative behaviors. In military and hierarchical settings, implementing systems to detect and address leadership reluctance before destructive patterns emerge is crucial. Across all contexts, leadership development programs should incorporate emotional regulation training and establish multi-source feedback mechanisms to bridge leader-follower perceptual gaps. This symposium makes a timely contribution to leadership research by integrating multiple perspectives on destructive dynamics within a unified theoretical framework. By examining leadership challenges across traditional, remote, and military contexts, these studies provide both comprehensive theoretical insights and immediately applicable solutions for organizations navigating increasingly complex leadership demands in the contemporary workplace.
