An implicit leadership theory examination of cultural values as moderators of the relationship between destructive leadership and followers’ task performance

Abstract

Destructive leadership and its effects on followers all over the world have been emphasized in cross-cultural research in recent years. Despite continued scholarly and practitioner interest in both destructive leadership and job performance due to its implications for cross-cultural research, we have an incomplete understanding of the impact of cultural context on the relationship between destructive leadership and followers’ task performance. We advance international business research by building and testing implicit leadership theory predictions about the impact of country-level cultural values as moderators of the relationship between destructive leadership and followers’ task performance. We test our hypotheses and research question with a meta-analytic dataset that includes respondents from 12 countries (k = 72, N = 20,878). Our results demonstrate that several of the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) framework’s cultural value dimensions moderate the relationship between destructive leadership and followers’ task performance across countries. The findings are driven by the strong predictive validity of the performance orientation, in-group collectivism, gender egalitarianism, and humane orientation cultural value dimensions. Our contributions are important because we generate nuanced knowledge about the independent, relative, and collective predictive validity of cultural values in explaining the strength of the relationship between destructive leadership and followers’ task performance across countries.