The Effects of Destructive Leadership on Organizational Citizenship Behaviour: The Mediating Role of Psychological Capital

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to test the impact of school principals’ destructive leadership behaviour on teachers’ perceptions of organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) via psychological capital (PsyCap) within a structural equation model. The study was conducted with causal research design. In this study, destructive leadership was taken as the independent variable, OCB as the dependent variable and PsyCap as the mediator variable. The study participants consisted of 253 high school teachers working in 21 of the schools selected from various school districts in the central districts of a metropolitan using the stratified sampling method. The data were collected with Destructive Leadership Questionnaire, PsyCap Questionnaire and OCB Questionnaire. Path analysis was conducted to enable associating measurement errors in both latent and observed variables. The research findings demonstrated that destructive leadership had negative impact on PsyCap and OCB while PsyCap had positive impact on organizational citizenship behavior. It was concluded that the mediator impact of PsyCap regarding the impact of destructive leadership on OCB was negative. Based on the negative impacts of destructive behaviours on teachers, defining and involving specific characteristics of destructive leaders and their consequences for schools and teachers into educational practices and policies would be helpful to prevent tendencies toward destructive behaviours. In this regard, applying systematic and effective selection process, using effective feedback mechanism and teacher participation in the management process may help eliminate destructive leadership.