领导者恩威并施的阴暗面及其治理机制——基于不确定性管理的视角

An Investigation on the Dark Side of Benevolent Authoritarian and Its Boundary Condition: An Uncertainty Management Theory Perspective

恩威并施通常被视为一种有效的领导策略,既能让下属感恩戴德,又能让下属遵守纪律。不同于传统观点,本研究认为当领导者展现出"仁慈"与"权威"两种互异的行为,下属面临这些不一致的信息时容易产生不确定感,从而危害到主观幸福感。本研究结合不确定性管理理论指出,组织公平感能够缓和"领导者恩威并施通过不确定感对主观幸福感产生的负面影响"。基于153份两个时间点追踪数据分析发现:(1)高水平的恩威并施(高仁慈和高威权)正向影响下属心理不确定感,进而降低下属的主观幸福感;(2)组织公平感负向调节领导者恩威并施与下属不确定感间的关系,以及心理不确定感在领导者恩威并施与下属主观幸福感间的中介效应。与低组织公平感相比,高组织公平感情况下领导者恩威并施对下属心理不确定感的影响更弱,整个中介效应也更弱。以上结果揭示了领导者恩威并施的潜在阴暗面,为领导者如何有效展现恩威并施提供了实践启发。

Contemporary organizations are faced with increasingly competing demands. In such background, single leadership style is not sufficient for coordinating and satisfying competing demands. Instead, leader ambidexterity which can successfully address and handle these competing demands has attracted more and more attention from both practitioners and scholars. In this study, we focus on a specific leader ambidexterity in Chinese background, namely benevolent authoritarian. Benevolent authoritarian refers to that leaders simultaneously engage in benevolent leadership behavior and authoritarian leadership behavior. To date, benevolent authoritarian has been found to improve subordinates’ positive job attitude and work outcome. Although benevolent authoritarian(an indigenous ambidextrous leadership) has been assumed to be a beneficial leadership by a large number of prior studies, we know little about the dark side of benevolent authoritarian. Do benevolent authoritarian has no harm to the subordinates’ cognitions and attitudes? To address this issue, we propose that benevolent authoritarian may be detrimental to subordinates’ well-being because of the inconsistent information induced by leaders show contradictory behaviors of "benevolent" and "authority".This study seeks to explore and examine the potential dark side of benevolent authoritarian. Drawing on uncertainty management theory, we expect that benevolent authoritarian is likely to evoke subordinates’ psychological uncertainty which in turn hinders subordinates’ objective well-being. Moreover, we argue that perceived organizational justice plays a moderating role in the relationship between benevolent authoritarian and subordinates’ perceived uncertainty as well as the indirect relationship between benevolent authoritarian and objective well-being via subordinates’ psychological uncertainty. Based on two wave data of 153 employees, the results of regression showed that:(1) benevolent authoritarian increased subordinates’ psychological uncertainty, which in turn reduces subordinates’ well-being;(2) perceived organizational justice negatively moderated the positive relationship between benevolent authoritarian and subordinates’ psychological uncertainty as well as the mediating effect of psychological uncertainty in the relationship between benevolent authoritarian and subordinates’ well-being. Compared with low levels of perceived organizational justice, high levels of perceived organizational justice made the influence of benevolent authoritarian on subordinates’ psychological uncertainty weaker, so is the whole indirect effect. Our study is among the first to reveal the potential dark side of benevolent authoritarian and provide practical insights for organizational leaders regarding how to be benevolent authoritarian effectively.