Repercussions of Leadership Failures: Evidence from the Textile Industry in Pakistan

Abstract

Employees are likely to showcase under-par performance when working conditions are not suitable for them or when they do not feel mentally sound. One of the major factors contributing to this is the presence of negative supervision at the workplace. The core aim of this objective study is to highlight the repercussions of negative styles of leadership at workplace. The study focuses on Despotic Leadership (DL) as well as Passive-Avoidant Leadership (PAL) in reference to the textile industry of Pakistan. The researchers aimed to inspect the influence of these negative styles of leadership on employees’ Counterproductive Work Behavior (CWB). The moderating effect of Employee Resilience (ER) was also analyzed as the resilience of employees provides resistance to the stressful environment. The underrepresentation and partial exploration of these negative styles of leadership in the existing literature, especially when it comes to South-Asian region, proved to be the unique aspect of this study. Another novel point of this research is the testing of ER as a moderator on the basis of theory of theory of Social Exchange (SE). The researchers gathered data from 365 non-managerial officiating staff deployed in large scale textile manufacturing units in Pakistan. Only three cities were targeted as those represent almost 70% of the whole industry in the country. PLS-SEM was deployed to conduct the analysis with results indicating that both DL and PAL have positive and significant linkage with CWB. ER found to be moderating the relationship between PAL and CWB but it does not moderate the relationship between DL and CWB. The study may prove to be accommodating in policy making for practitioners of the industry in addition to the novel contributions towards the existing literature.