Unmasking narcissistic leadership: a multilevel time-lagged study of the mediating role of employee resilience and the moderating role of supportive team climate

TL;DR

This study explores how narcissistic leadership affects employee innovation in SMEs, showing that resilience and supportive teams can reduce negative impacts.

Contribution

The study reveals how employee resilience and supportive team climate jointly shape innovation outcomes under narcissistic leadership.

Findings

Narcissistic leadership negatively affects employees' innovative behavior.

Employee resilience mediates the relationship between narcissistic leadership and innovation.

Supportive team climate weakens the negative effects of narcissistic leadership.

Abstract

This study examines how narcissistic leadership influences employees’ innovative behavior in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), focusing on employee resilience as a mediating mechanism and supportive team climate as a contextual moderator. Drawing on Conservation of Resources (COR) theory and Self-Determination Theory (SDT), the study clarifies the psychological and team-level processes through which narcissistic leadership affects innovation outcomes.

The study collected data through a three-wave, time-lagged survey from 445 employees nested within 84 teams in Chinese SMEs. To test the proposed cross-level mediation and moderation relationships, the study used multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM).

The results reveal a significant negative relationship between narcissistic leadership and employees’ innovative behaviors. Employee resilience mediates the relationship between narcissistic leadership and innovative behavior. In addition, a supportive team climate moderates the negative effect of narcissistic leadership on employees’ innovative behaviors, as well as the relationship between narcissistic leadership and employee resilience, such that these negative effects are weaker under conditions of high team-level support.

These findings show that individual psychological resources and team-level contextual factors play critical roles in explaining how narcissistic leadership undermines employee innovation.

This study contributes to the literature on destructive leadership by revealing how employee resilience and supportive team climate jointly shape innovation outcomes in multilevel organizational contexts. Practically, the findings suggest that cultivating supportive team environments can help buffer the harmful effects of narcissistic leadership by protecting employees’ psychological resilience and sustaining innovative engagement.

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