Another SEM study goes even deeper into what makes a bad boss
Today I am reading another phenomenal article in the Journal of Business Ethics looking at what makes a bad boss. As we have discussed before, abusive supervision is the first thing we think about when we imagine a bad boss. This abuse shows itself in ridiculing employees, been harsh to them, or treating them with contempt. The leader has a lack of emotional control. In simple terms: the leader just loses it!
I asked a friend about their new job. “It’s bad, the boss just yells at everyone.” You got an abusive bad boss — mis-leading by verbal abuse.
In this article, they looked at another dimension of toxic leadership and compared it with abusive supervision. This new dimension is exploitative leadership: a much cooler, calculating way to be a bad boss. This type of boss takes credit for your work, purposefully gives you all the difficult tasks, and exploits you so that their career prospects increase while your career stays underdeveloped. Under this boss, you cannot get ahead.
The researchers did a field study and two experimental studies to evaluate the same model using structural equation modeling (SEM). This SEM model conceptualized exploitative leadership and abusive supervision as factors that impacted the leader member exchange (LMX), but in a much more fine-tuned way than I have seen done before. They separated the cold, cognitive mechanisms from the hot, affective ones. The cold pathway travels through leader member social exchange (LMSX), a cognitive appraisal of unfairness and unbalance in the leader-member relationship. The affective, hot path travels via the negative affect of experiencing a boss that is horrible and has it out for you. Both paths end in the member’s dissatisfaction rating of their leader.
The researchers were quite careful by picking measures that were reliable and valid. They went even further, by estimating a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to demonstrate that these constructs were indeed distinct from each other from a psychometric point of view. I really liked this methodological attention to detail. It is how you know you are reading high quality science in leadership. After doing this, they estimated the structural equation model repeatedly.
Importantly, they were able to explain around three fourths of the variation in dissatisfaction scores (R2 ranged from 0.72 to 0.82), which for leadership studies is quite high. These hot and cold mechanisms do explain the majority of why members are dissatisfied with their leaders.
In the field study, they found out that, as predicted, exploitative leadership works through the cold path, although it also had a smaller impact via the hot path. Abusive supervision followed the hot, emotional path.
In the experimental studies, they tested the same model using stimuli to mirror both abusive and exploitative leadership, and they found very similar results. Thus, they established causality. A wonderful example of complementary studies that strengthen both the internal (causality) and external (relevancy) validity of the entire article.
Implications for leaders
- There are two separate ways to be a bad boss, one by lacking emotional control resulting in verbal abuse, and the other exploiting workers for selfish gain. These are two distinct ways to be toxic.
- The way we experience these types of toxic leadership are through cognitive assessments of unfairness and injustice (the cold path) and negative, emotional experiences (the hot path). Either way, we become dissatisfied with the leader and the leadership we experience.
- The authors point out that exploitative leadership may be much harder to detect than abusive leadership. They recommend systematic, 360° performance evaluations. I agree. We need to develop mechanisms for employees to report manipulative bosses. Sometimes, it feels like the organizations do not want to know. Some systematic way to get comparable information from all involved (360) is quite easy to do and it is also cost effective with the technology we now have. It should become standard.
- The authors are realistic in accepting that changing a bad boss’s behavior is extremely arduous work. They suggest ensuring that organizational benefits be used to ensure satisfaction with the organization. If you have a bad boss at least you have a good organization, in terms of pay and benefits and other support. I have to say I had mixed feelings about this, because we should not be paying people to put up with abuse, should we? The extra organizational benefits may trap people in abusive relationships because from a pay/benefit point of view the job is so hard to replace.
- For me, part of the solution is leadership 360 evaluation at regular intervals, as mentioned above, but coupled with targeted leadership training. This would change the incentives in the workplace, provide real data to make leadership decisions, and make transparent organizational commitments to leadership improvement. If a bad boss does not improve in a reasonable period of time, they should not be a boss.
- Sometimes a bad boss lacks emotional restraint and is also a strategic, self-interested, exploitative person. They could be both. It would be great to have a nationally representative survey that would estimate the prevalence of these four groups (bad boss abusive, bad boss exploitative, bad boss both, good boss). The closest to this wish in this article is an initial citation to a survey on page 1 that reported “nearly 80% of employees at some point feel exploited at work.” That is a high number.
Suggestions for dissertation students
Once again, LMX is a wonderful opportunity for dissertation students with its well-developed measures and theories.
Reference:
Pircher Verdorfer, A., Belschak, F., & Bobbio, A. (2023). Felt or Thought: Distinct Mechanisms Underlying Exploitative Leadership and Abusive Supervision. Journal of Business Ethics, 1–21.
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