17275: Narcissists’ Daily Ego Depletion on Next-Day Abusive Supervision:The Role of Unhealthy Eating (session 25639)

Abusive supervision, a prevalent form of toxic leadership, has been consistently documented to have detrimental effects on employees and organizations. Despite ample evidence of its harmful consequences, actionable insights on what triggers these toxic behaviours are paramount. Drawing on self-regulation theory, we propose that leaders’ daily work-induced ego depletion contributes to abusive supervisory behaviour the next day through their after-work unhealthy eating. We further posit leader narcissistic admiration and rivalry as differently shaping these daily processes because the two facets express themselves in different self-regulatory mechanisms. We test our moderated mediation model with daily diary data collected over ten consecutive working days from 112 leaders and their 225 followers from five Chinese organizations. Using Dynamic Structural Equation Modelling, we confirmed that leaders’ daily work-induced ego depletion was positively linked to their after-work unhealthy eating, which, contrary to expectation, did however not lead to next-day abusive supervision, as rated by their followers. Instead, this relationship was moderated by leader narcissism, such that narcissistic admiration weakened, while narcissistic rivalry strengthened the effect of daily work-induced ego depletion on next-day abusive supervision via after-work unhealthy eating. We discuss important theoretical and practical implications of our study, which revolve around the crucial role of work-induced ego depletion and unhealthy eating for abusive supervision, contingent on leaders’ narcissism.

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