ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1653061
The Bidirectional Relationship Between Destructive Leadership and Organizational Commitment
Provisionally accepted
- Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This study aimed to determine how destructive leadership and organizational commitment relate to each other across time. Over 18 months, a self-rated questionnaire was distributed at four timepoints to employees of local government organizations in a municipality in Sweden; 582 employees responded to the questionnaire on at least one occasion. The Destructive Leadership Scale was used to measure destructive leadership, and the Commitment to the Workplace scale was used to measure organizational commitment. A second-order parallel-process latent growth curve model was used to test if initial levels of destructive leadership predict later change in organizational commitment, if initial levels of organizational commitment predict later change in destructive leadership, and if changes in destructive leadership are associated with simultaneous changes in organizational commitment. The results show that the initial levels of destructive leadership negatively predicted change in organizational commitment (β = -0.66, p < 0.001), the initial levels of organizational commitment negatively predicted change in destructive leadership (β = -0.84, p < 0.002), and the rate of change in destructive leadership was strongly and negatively associated with the rate of change in organizational commitment (r = -0.96, p < 0.001) The findings indicate that destructive leadership affects the work environment in a negative way by undermining employee's organizational commitment. At the same time, managers are negatively affected by uncommitted employees, exacerbating destructive leadership behaviors.
Keywords: Destructive leadership, organizational commitment, Job Demands-Resources model, self-determination theory, Longitudinal Studies, latent growth-curve modeling, Industrial Psychology, Psychosocial work environment
Received: 24 Jun 2025; Accepted: 26 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Grill and Elgueta. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Martin Grill, Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.