Narcissistic leadership and behavioral cynicism in the hotel industry: the role of employee silence and negative workplace gossiping

Abstract

Purpose Building on leader-member exchange and social cognitive theories, this paper aims to propose a model of the influence of narcissistic leadership on hotel employees’ behavioral cynicism through the mediating roles of employee silence and negative work-related gossiping on this relationship. Design/methodology/approach The model was examined using covariance-based structural equation modeling using data collected from 468 employees working in several different departments in Italian hotels. Findings The findings illustrate that narcissistic leadership positively affects behavioral cynicism. Furthermore, employee silence and negative work-related gossiping are shown to have a significant mediating effect on this relationship. Practical implications The study may be of use for hotel managers as it demonstrates how narcissism can be very damaging to their organizations and employees. Originality/value To date, this study is the first to examine negative work-related gossiping and employee silence as mediator variables in the relationship between narcissistic leadership and behavioral cynicism in the hotel industry. Further, this research makes a significant contribution to the hospitality literature as the topic of narcissistic leadership has not, to date, been adequately investigated in the sector.

Examining the Mediating Role of Organisational Support on the Relationship Between Organisational Cynicism and Turnover Intention in Technology Firms in Istanbul

“…Organisational research highlighted the existence of cynicism in the workplace as cynicism affects organisations (Chiaburu et al, 2013;Li and Chen, 2018;Jiang et al, 2019;Aboramadan et al, 2021). Organisational cynicism has been on the rise due to mismanagement, scandal and self-centred attitudes in the workplace (Arslan and Roudaki, 2019).…”

Leader Narcissism and Employee Organizational Citizenship Behavior Directed Toward the Leader: Roles of Perceived Insider Status and Need for Self-Esteem

“…Second, this study proposed and tested the mediating role of perceived insider status between leader narcissism and employee OCB-L and revealed the internal mechanism underlying that relationship. By reviewing the prior literatures on the effects of leader narcissism on employees’ behaviors, our study concluded that most scholars have mainly followed three perspectives: the social exchange perspective ( O’Boyle et al, 2012 ; Wang et al, 2018 ; Liao et al, 2019b ), the conservation of resources perspective ( Huang et al, 2020 ; Yao et al, 2020 ; Norouzinik et al, 2021 ) and the social cognitive perspective ( Zhang et al, 2018 ; Aboramadan et al, 2021 ). Although existing studies have helped us to understand the influencing mechanism of leader narcissism on employees’ behaviors from different perspectives, no research to date has explored it from the perspective of self-concept.…”

Fire in the belly: the impact of despotic leadership on employees work-related outcomes in the hospitality setting

“…Those include servant leadership (Karatepe et al, 2020;Ye et al, 2019), transformational leadership (Gui et al, 2020;Patiar and Wang, 2016), empowering leadership (Chiang and Chen, 2020) and authentic leadership (Kaya and Karatepe, 2020;Ribeiro et al, 2020;Wang and Xie, 2020). Recently, hospitality research has shifted toward examining the dark side of leadership (Zhao and Guo, 2019) because of its negative effects on employees and organizations alike (Aboramadan et al, 2021b). A possible explanation of this shift is the higher levels of burnout, turnover and decreased degrees of motivation and satisfaction reported among hospitality employees (Hight et al, 2019), resulting from destructive leadership or toxic leadership (Mathieu and Babiak, 2016).…”

“…abusive leadership) or ego-nurturing behavior (e.g. narcissistic leadership) may even benefit the organization to attain its overall goals (Aboramadan et al, 2021b;Tepper, 2000). On the contrary, the complete obedience requested by despotic leaders increases employees' fears regarding their inability to meet the job demands and performance targets (Naseer et al, 2016), which can deteriorate the organizational performance.…”

“…In hospitality, when discussing destructive leadership styles, studies have examined different leadership styles such as narcissistic leadership (Aboramadan et al, 2021b), leaders from hell (Hight et al, 2019), abusive leadership (Zhao and Guo, 2019;Shum et al, 2020) and destructive leadership (Nyberg et al, 2011). In comparison to these styles, despotic leadership is considered to be the most destructive and self-centered style among other dark leadership styles (Naseer et al, 2016).…”