The longitudinal association between Supportive-Disloyal Leadership, Moral Disengagement and Counterproductive Work Behaviors

Destructive leadership come in many forms and shapes, including one where a given leader portray supportive behaviors towards subordinates while simultaneously being disloyal towards the organization they serve. A Supportive-Disloyal leader is as a kind of supervisor who, for the sake of achieving personal goals, may strategically show concerns for the wellbeing of followers but, at the same time, may violate the legitimate interest of the organization. As an example, the Supportive-Disloyal leader may misuse material or financial resources of the organization, may exploit followers by granting them more benefits at the cost of the organization, and may also appreciate or foster negativity in followers (Aasland et al., 2010; Einarsen et al., 2002). Such leadership practices may then have important detrimental effect on the moral engagement and behaviors of subordinates. The link between such Supportive-Disloyal Leadership, Moral Disengagement and Counterproductive Work Behaviors among subordinates was therefore addressed by means of a longitudinal survey study. Moral disengagement is the complex socio-cognitive process of convincing the self that ethical standards do not apply to oneself in a particular context, and therefore it involves the cognitive re-construing or re-framing of destructive behaviors as being morally acceptable without changing the behavior or the moral standards (Bandura et al., 1996). Counterproductive Work Behavior is employee behavior that goes against the legitimate interests of the organization, by harming the organization as a whole or people in organizations such as employees and clients, customers, or patients (Sackett et al., 2006). Our main hypothesis was that daily interactions with a Supportive-Disloyal leader, even considering a relatively short period of time, would be associated with an increase of Moral Disengagement among followers and this, in turn, would eventually result in a proliferation of Counterproductive Work Behaviors displayed by followers. In sum, we imagined the existence of a vicious cycle connecting these three variables. A structured anonymous questionnaire was distributed three times to a group of 632 Italian adult workers, with a time lag of about seven between the measurement points. A path analysis model was implemented and tested adopting the Bayesian approach. Interestingly enough, Supportive-Disloyal leadership was found to mediate the relation between Moral Disengagement and Counterproductive Work Behavior. Therefore, it seemed that a Moral Disengagement-oriented attitude among followers could constitute the basis for a Supportive-Disloyal leadership style to emerge, with negative consequences in terms of the Counterproductive Work Behaviors of subordinates coming afterwards. The interplay between Moral Disengagement and Supportive-Disloyal leadership needs to be explored more carefully, since Supportive-Disloyal behaviors could be one of the most subtle paths a leader can walk along in order to act destructively against both organizations and followers.