Beyond a Single Strain Pathway: Emotional Exhaustion and Behavior-Specific Stress as Competing Mediators of the Abusive Leadership–Employee Engagement Relationship

Abstract

Purpose: This study will explore the effect of abusive leadership on employee engagement and test the two psychological mechanisms (agreeing psychological mechanisms) between leader behavior and employee engagement—emotional Exhaustion (EE) & Behavior-Specific Stress Response (ST) between leader behavior and employee engagement.

Design/Methodology/Approach: Abusive Leadership is assumed to be a composite independent variable composed of three factors: Belittling (BB), Yelling (YL), and Scapegoating (SC). Behavior-Specific Stress is modeled as a composite mediator combining Credit Stealing (CS) and Stress Response (ST) to the notion that the credit stealing behavior and the stress it produces is a single proximal stress mechanism. Emotional Exhaustion (EE) is a second mediator that is more general. The dependent variable is Employee Engagement (EEG). The collected data were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS 4 with a sample of 202 IT-sector employees from Pakistan, out of which 190 were usable.

Results: The measurement model showed good reliability and convergent validity with Cronbach's alpha, rho_A and composite reliability values above the recommended values and average variance extracted (AVE) values above 0.50 for all four constructs. The structural model accounted for a significant amount of variance in the employee engagement (R² = 0.846). Bootstrapped path estimates (with 5,000 subsamples) indicated that when Emotional Exhaustion was added to the same model, the direct path of Abusive Leadership to Emotional Exhaustion was strong (β = 0.164, p < .001), while the direct path of Abusive Leadership to Behavior-Specific Stress was modest (β = 0.315, p < .001). The direct path of Emotional Exhaustion to engagement was not significant (β = 0.093, p = .280); the direct path of Behavior-Specific Stress to engagement remained significant (β = 0.266, p < .001).

Theoretical/Practical Implications: Taken together, these results suggest that a proximal, behavior-referenced stress mechanism fits the psychological connection between abusive leadership and engagement better than a generalized, resource-depletion exhaustion account, while also capturing more of the variance in the psychological connection between the two variables. The theoretical contributions to Affective Events Theory and Conservation of Resources theory are discussed and implications for behavior specific leadership interventions are drawn.