Under the Shadow of Destructive Leadership: Causal Effect of Job stress on Turnover Intention of Employees in Call Centers

The purpose of the study is to analyze the dark side of leadership behaviors leading to cause job stress and their impact on turnover intention of employees as work outcome. Working under the dark shadow of destructive leaders creates stress and anxiety that effect indirectly and consequently lead employees to turnover from their job position or designation. The research study is exploratory in approach. The scales were adapted from that measure to analyze the destructive leadership exhibiting negative behaviors causing job stress, also highlights the evidence in support of the conceptual model. The sample chosen for this research are employees working in telecommunication call centers of Lahore city region in Pakistan that generated 250 respondents by survey data collection. AMOS (SEM) was employed for data analysis. The results showed that Abusive supervision and Derailed leadership behaviors contained the positive influence on Turnover intention followed by mediating effect of job stress analyzed by bootstrapping technique contained partial and full mediation in relation with turnover intention respectively. Outcome from the conducted study depicted that more knowledge and awareness about the leadership behaviors and perspective in organizations in relation to its consequences is needed to be dealt with. The study provided evidence along with a proposed model that directed the readers‟ and researchers attention towards the dark side behaviors of leader in a stress building environment such as telecommunication sector. This empirical study provides a preliminary evidence of the mediating role job stress when faced with destructive behaviors of leaders that stresses to have an impact on Turnover Intention of employees