An Empirical Study of the Effect of Leadership Exclusion on Employee Initiative Behavior

Abstract

In recent years, leadership rejection has become an important topic of widespread academic concern as a factor that constrains individual career development and affects the competitive advantage of organizations. Although studies have been conducted on the implementation effect of leadership rejection, the role mechanism of leadership rejection has been less studied. In this study, we examine the impact of leadership rejection on employees' proactive behaviors and analyze the mediating effects of organizational identification, psychological empowerment, and the moderating effects of power distance. The path analysis of the two-stage survey data of 295 employees indicates that leadership rejection reduces employees' proactive behaviors by lowering subordinates' identification with the organization on the one hand and by lowering employees' psychological empowerment on the other. For employees with high power distance, leadership rejection has a weaker negative impact on employee proactive behavior by enhancing organizational identification; for employees with low power distance, leadership rejection has a stronger negative impact on employee work engagement by reducing psychological empowerment.

Keywords

• supervision ostracism
• personal initiative
• psychological empowerment
• organizational identification
• power distance