Destructive Leaders

Methods

Sampling and Procedures

To test the hypotheses, we used a convenience sample of 210 employees from 80 Portuguese companies from the services sector (50 firms) and the industry sector (30 firms). The majority of employees is female (59%), 32 years old on average and having completed 15.9 years of schooling, nine years of tenure, and no experience in leading a team (82%). All respondents were asked to fill in a questionnaire with measures of destructive leadership, ethical climate, and organisational innovation. They were asked to respond bearing in mind their leader. (See Table 1 for results for demographics issues).

Table 1: Descriptive statistics 

Measures

We used a multi-item questionnaire with a Likert 7-point scale where "1 = strongly disagree" and "7 = strongly agree" to assess the constructs: Destructive Leadership, Organisational Innovation, and Ethical Climate. To measure destructive leadership, we used a reduced version of the questionnaire of Shaw et al. and May and Meier. This questionnaire presents 49 items related to leadership behaviour, including: abusive behaviour addressing to counterproductive work behaviors (24 items) (α = 0.96), poor management (21 items) (α =0.97), and inadequate communication of expectations (4 items) (α = 0.89). Respondents were asked to indicate to what extent they agree or disagree with each statement about their current leader. Sample items of abusive behaviour include "When my boss makes a mistake he or she rarely corrects it" and "My boss spends too much time promoting him/herself", of poor management include "My boss is a poor negotiator" and "My boss is unable to prioritize very well"; and inadequate communication "I rarely know what my boss things about my work" and "I often have to guess what my boss really expects of me". To measure organisational innovation, we used Garcia's - behavioural innovation (5 items) (α = .85). A sample item in this measure is: "We are continuously improving our management process". Finally, to measure ethical climate, an adapted version of the questionnaire proposed by Cullen et al. was used addressing caring climate (10 items). A sample item of this measure includes "The decisions are taken in order to benefit all". Respondents were asked to describe how things happen in their organisations. Following Podsakoff et al., several measures were taken when preparing the questionnaire to reduce the common method variance bias (CMVB). Techniques used for detecting CMVB confirm the absence of bias.