The Role of Employees 'OCB and Leaders' Hindrance Stress in the Emergence of Self-Serving Leadership

Media reports on self-serving leadership primarily focused on the negative consequences of such behavior for employees. However, much remains to be understood about the antecedents of self-serving behavior of leaders. In the present research we explore the role of employees' organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in the emergence of self-serving leadership. Using one multi-source field study and three experiments, we showed that employees' OCB towards coworkers (OCBI) negatively impacted self-serving leadership. Moreover, we also examine the underlying mechanism for this relation. Results indicate that employees' OCBI mitigated leaders' hindrance stress, which mediates the relationship between OCBI and self-serving leadership. As such, our findings indicate that self-serving leaders are not necessarily inherently bad and that employees have an important role in shaping leaders' self-serving behavior. © 2014 Elsevier Inc.publisher: Elsevier articletitle: The role of employees' OCB and leaders' hindrance stress in the emergence of self-serving leadership journaltitle: The Leadership Quarterly articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2014.02.005 content_type: article copyright: Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.status: publishe