The Impact of Leader Work Competence on Employees: From a Social Structure Perspective

Within an organizational social structure, leaders are generally regarded as high-status members compared to their followers. From a social structure perspective, followers are likely to hold high expectations regarding their leaders' work competence due to the influence of the status-competence stereotype (i.e., high-status groups are expected to be competent). Our study investigates how a leader's work competence affects followers' responses, specifically in terms of employee contempt and deviant behavior to leader. Drawing from system justification theory, we further explore the boundary condition of followers' just world belief on the relationship between leader work competence and employee contempt. We conducted two multi-source, multi-wave field studies to test our hypotheses. Both Study 1 and Study 2 found a negative effect of leader work competence on employee contempt, and an indirect negative effect of leader work competence on deviant behavior to leader through employee contempt. Additionally, the results of Study 1 showed that employee contempt had a unique mediating effect on the relationship between leader work competence and deviant behavior to leader, in contrast to other negative feelings like anger and fear. Finally, the results of Study 2 highlight the moderating effect of followers' just world belief, which mitigates the negative impact of leader work competence on follower reactions within leader-follower interactions.