Understanding Destructive Leadership: The Impact of Narcissistic and Abusive Practices on Employee Outcomes in Contemporary Organizations

The serious issue contemporary organizations are facing is destructive leadership, particularly narcissistic and abusive practices, which negatively impacts employee outcomes such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and psychological well-being. It is widely observed on a daily basis in Pakistan, but studies are very limited. To address this gap, the current study aims to find the impact of narcissistic and abusive practices on employee outcomes operationalized as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and psychological well-being among employees in contemporary organizations in Pakistan. The study adopted a cross-sectional correlational study design and a purposive sampling technique to collect data from employees working in various organizations, with at least an age of 19, at least a matric or O-level, and at least 1 year of experience in the certain organization. The study utilized four measures, i.e., the Toxic Leadership Scale (to measure narcissistic and abusive practices only), Allen and Meyer’s Organizational Commitment Scale, the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire, and the Psychological Well-Being Scale. The Pearson product correlation indicated that narcissistic and abusive practices has a significant negative relationship with job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and psychological well-being. Furthermore, regression analysis depicted that narcissistic and abusive practices have a significant and negative effect on job satisfaction. Narcissistic practices negatively however, do not significantly predict organizational commitment, but abusive practices significantly and negatively predict organizational commitment. Moreover, the narcissistic practices negatively and significantly predicted the psychological well-being, but the abusive practices negatively but not significantly predict the psychological well-being. The study provided detailed implications at the end.