ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
This article is part of the Research TopicEmployee Resilience - Volume IIView all 8 articles
Unmasking Narcissistic Leadership: A Multilevel Time-lagged Study of the Mediating Role of Employee Resilience and the Moderating Role of Supportive Team Climate
Provisionally accepted
Juhee Hahn*
Li Xin- Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
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Objectives: This study examines how narcissistic leadership influences employees' innovative behavior in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), focusing on employee resilience as a mediating mechanism and supportive team climate as a contextual moderator. Drawing on Conservation of Resources (COR) theory and Self-Determination Theory (SDT), the study clarifies the psychological and team-level processes through which narcissistic leadership affects innovation outcomes. Methodology: The study collected data through a three-wave, time-lagged survey from 445 employees nested within 84 teams in Chinese SMEs. To test the proposed cross-level mediation and moderation relationships, the study used multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM). Findings: The results reveal a significant negative relationship between narcissistic leadership and employees' innovative behaviors. Employee resilience mediates the relationship between narcissistic leadership and innovative behavior. In addition, a supportive team climate moderates the negative effect of narcissistic leadership on employees' innovative behaviors, as well as the relationship between narcissistic leadership and employee resilience, such that these negative effects are weaker under conditions of high team-level support. Conclusion: These findings show that individual psychological resources and team-level contextual factors play critical roles in explaining how narcissistic leadership undermines employee innovation. Implications: This study contributes to the literature on destructive leadership by revealing how employee resilience and supportive team climate jointly shape innovation outcomes in multilevel organizational contexts. Practically, the findings suggest that cultivating supportive team environments can help buffer the harmful effects of narcissistic leadership by protecting employees' psychological resilience and sustaining innovative engagement.
Keywords: Employee resilience, Employees' innovative behavior, Multilevel Analysis, Narcissistic leadership, supportive team climate
Received: 07 Jan 2026; Accepted: 13 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Hahn and Xin. 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: Juhee Hahn
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