Discipline vs. dominance: The relationships between different types of authoritarian leadership and employee self-interested voice

Discipline-focused and dominance-focused authoritarian leadership are two different types of authoritarian leadership. While the detrimental effects of authoritarian leadership on employees’ organizational-focused voice have been established in the literature, we have yet to understand the relationships between different types of authoritarian leadership and employees’ self-interested voice. Drawing on uncertainty management theory, this research argues that discipline-focused authoritarian leadership will be negatively related to employees’ self-interested voice via decreased work alienation, whereas dominance-focused authoritarian leadership will be positively related to employees’ self-interested voice via increased work alienation. We also predict that employees’ perceived overqualification will moderate the relations between different types of authoritarian leadership and work alienation. We collected two-wave data from 495 employees and their direct supervisors. Our findings suggest that work alienation mediated the negative relationship between discipline-focused authoritarian leadership and self-interested voice. In contrast, work alienation mediated the positive relationship between dominance-focused authoritarian leadership and self-interested voice. Additionally, the positive relationship between dominance-focused authoritarian leadership and work alienation was enhanced for employees high in perceived overqualification. Our findings suggest managers display more discipline-focused authoritarian leadership than dominance-focused authoritarian leadership to reduce employees’ work deviation and self-interested voice.