Leaders’ performance goals and employees’ counterproductive work behaviour: the mediating role of comparative feedback

In today’s competitive world, organizations may value leaders who strive to outperform others. Yet, past research shows that such leaders can also harm the organization through their own harmful attitudes and behaviours. In this paper, we contend that the detrimental effects highlighted in past research may reflect only part of the story and that leaders who focus on outperforming others can also indirectly harm the organization by eliciting harmful behaviour in employees. Drawing on Achievement Goal Theory, we propose that leaders with high performance-approach goals (i.e. striving to outperform others) will be more likely to provide their employees with comparative feedback, in which an employee’s performance is discussed and evaluated by explicitly comparing it to the performance of other employees. Building on Feedback Intervention Theory, we further argue that receiving comparative feedback from a leader will be positively related to employees’ emotional exhaustion, and consequently their counterproductive work behaviour. Data from a three-wave survey design using multi-source reports from 631 employees and 221 corresponding leaders supported our hypotheses. The indirect effect between comparative feedback and counterproductive work behaviour via emotional exhaustion was replicated in a second time-separated survey study among 280 employees.