Energized or Exhausted? How Leader Antagonistic Machiavellianism Shapes the Charismatic Consequences of Autonomy

Autonomy is an important contextual antecedent for leaders to appear charismatic. However, leaders differ in how productively they can use autonomy. This research examines whether the relationship between leader autonomy and followers’ charisma attributions depends on leader characteristics involving their responses to autonomy. Drawing from theories of Machiavellianism, we suggest autonomy alternately reduces (increases) strain for leaders who are higher (lower) in Machiavellianism (H1). More strained leaders are then less able to enact behaviors that appear charismatic (H2). We conducted a preregistered experiment with random assignment of autonomy (Study 1), and a two-wave field survey of leader-follower dyads (Study 2). H1 was preregistered; H2 was not preregistered. Results suggest, conditional on the assumption that strain mediates the relationship between autonomy and charisma, strain accounts for a significant portion of their shared variance, and the relationship between autonomy and strain depends on leaders’ Machiavellianism. However, other causal models cannot be excluded.