Detrimental Impact of Abusive Leadership on Employee Mental Health, Psychological Wellbeing, and Presenteeism in Chinese Entrepreneurial Organizations

Abstract

Objectives: Employees are the main working force of every organization and their well-being is important for the productivity, performance and growth of the firms. However, the negative behavior of the leaders distorts the healthy employee well-being and causes them to sacrifice their physical and mental well-being and show at work and behave presenteeism. Methods: This study investigated the dark side of abusive leadership in damaging the employees' mental health and psychological well-being and increasing presenteeism behavior. Moreover, the study also investigated the negative mediation of performance pressure and workload pressure in between the direct relationship of abusive leadership with the dependent variables. Results: The study adopted a quantitative research methodology and targeted the employees of the Chinese entrepreneurial enterprise organization from the manufacturing, construction and service sectors using the survey questionnaire approach. The questionnaire approach was incorporated for the data collection using the simple random sampling technique to identify the respondents of this study. Conclusion: The regression analysis revealed heartening results for the employee well-being. The study concluded the results by summarizing the results outcomes and implied the fact that abusive leadership has adverse effects on the employees' mental and psychological well-being and promotes presenteeism and for further deteriorating effects, the performance pressure plays an additional role.