In this study, we examined how leaders' customer interactions influence their tendency to abuse their followers. Specifically, we drew from ego-depletion theory to suggest that surface acting during customer interactions depletes leaders of their self-control resources, resulting in elevated levels of abusive supervision. Furthermore, we hypothesized that the effect of surface acting on abusive supervision is moderated by leaders' trait self-control, such that leaders with high trait self-control will be less affected by the depleting effects of surface acting than their peers. Results from a multiwave, multisource leader-follower dyad study in the service and sales industries provided support for our hypotheses. This research contributes to several literatures, particularly to an emerging area of study--the antecedents of leaders' abusive behaviors.

Concerns over unethical leader behavior persist in today's workplace. Although some employees continue to support their leaders after learning of their unethical actions, others do not. In this paper, we integrate social cognitive theory with social information processing theory to propose that the support employees give to leaders who act unethically hinges on their propensity to morally disengage.Specifically, we develop a conditional indirect effects model, wherein moral disengagement propensity mitigates the negative impact of unethical leader behavior on leader-directed support via employees' perceptions of value congruence with and trust in the leader. The sum result is an improved understanding of when and why employees offer support to versus withhold support from leaders who act in ethically questionable ways.

Leadership is a process where leaders enact certain behaviors to influence followers. Yet, each follower may view the leader’s enactment differently, owing to differences in disposition and context. Here we examine leadership as a property attributed by followers to their leader, influenced by both the leader and followers’ personal attributes and the situation in which leaders and followers interact. Guiding this study, we asked: how do followers’ affect (negative and positive traits), motivation (regulatory focus), and cognitions (identity) and their congruence with their leader’s corresponding attributes influence their ratings of transformational leadership? Participants operated in extreme situations where their lives were often at risk because of exposure to combat. Results based on a sample of 1587 US Army soldiers operating in 262 units show that when there is a higher congruence between leaders’ and followers’ positive affect, promotion focus, relational identity, and collective identity, follower ratings of transformational leadership are higher, whereas a higher level of incongruence between followers’ and leaders’ positive and negative affect predicted lower ratings of transformational leadership. These findings differed based on the soldiers’ time spent in deployment and the level of combat exposure they experienced.

It is important to understand the processes behind how and why individuals emerge as leaders, so that the best and most capable individuals may occupy leadership positions. So far, most literature in this area has focused on individual characteristics, such as personality or cognitive ability. While interactions between individuals and context do get research attention, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how the social context at work may help individuals to emerge as leaders. Such knowledge could make an important contribution toward getting the most capable, rather than the most dominant or narcissistic individuals, into leadership positions. In the present work, we contribute toward closing this gap by testing a mediation chain linking a leader's leader self-awareness to a follower's leadership emergence with two time-lagged studies (nstudy1 = 449, nstudy2 = 355). We found that the leader's leader self-awareness was positively related to (a) the follower's leadership emergence and (b) the follower's nomination for promotion and that both relationships were serially mediated by the follower's self-leadership and the follower's leader self-efficacy. We critically discuss our findings and provide ideas for future research.

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