Harrison, Jake; Romney, Alexander C. (Utah State University)
Faculty Advisor: Romney, Alexander (Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, Marketing and Strategy Department)
Narcissism in organizations is becoming increasingly prevalent, as evidenced by the growing number of CEOs that seek acclaim and dominance, often at the expense of others (Chatterjee, 2017). Narcissism is defined as "individuals for whom enhancing the positivity of the self (specifically, to achieve status and esteem) is overwhelmingly important" (Campbell, 2004), and most often wields a detrimental influence on organizations. Typically, narcissism within organizational leadership has shown to lead employees to view managers' behavior as self-serving, lowering perceptions of managerial trustworthiness and increasing the likelihood of employee silence (Hamstra, 2019). Additionally, scholars have empirically demonstrated that silence provokes specific emotions, with anger being a particularly common emotional consequence of silence (Kirrane, 2017). The main effect of narcissism seems to lie in a stronger arousal of anger (Laurenz, 2013), which in turn may energize employees to proactively change the situation (Lebel, 2016). Employees often generate awareness of specific dissatisfying aspects of work by means of prohibitive voice (Chamberlin, 2017), which emphasizes harmful, failing, or wrongful work practices or events that currently exist (Liang, 2012).
In this study, I hope to examine how a leader's narcissism could arouse anger in employees and energize them to engage in prohibitive voice. Specifically, I hypothesize that a higher level of anger derived from a narcissistic leader's actions will positively correlate to a higher frequency of employee voice.
Hypotheses:
1. Perceived managerial narcissism will relate positively to employee voice.
2. Perceived anger will mediate the relationship between managerial narcissism and employee voice.
3. Employee status will moderate the relationship between managerial narcissism and employee voice.
This study is aimed to contribute to our understanding of the correlation between leadership and employee voice. I will test these hypotheses by recruiting 200 full-time employees to complete a survey. No identifying information will be collected.