Impact of Authoritarian Leadership on Emotional Exhaustion: Mediating Role of Acquiescent Silence and Moderating Role of Power Distance. A Study of Public sector organizations of Twin cities.

Abstract

The purpose of the current study is to investigate the impact of authoritarian leadership on emotional exhaustion, on employees who are working in public sector organizations of Pakistan. Furthermore, this study takes acquiescent silence as mediator and power distance as moderator. When employees consciously withhold information and ideas from higher authorities who play an important role in organizational decisions, the performance of organization will decrease. Researchers found that when individuals are faced with the choice to raise voice or not, then they remain silent. Present study extends the theoretical understanding of antecedents of employee silence in organizations, perception about power and authority, consequences of silent behavior at the workplace. Study proposed that individual personal sense of power which means how they perceive power and authoritarian leadership will affect their silent behavior and emotional well-being. Adopted questionnaires were used to collect primary data and responses were from Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Convenient sampling is used to collect the data from the sample size of 302 junior employees in public sector organizations of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Data analysis was done by using Smart PLS for reliability, mediation and moderation analysis. IBM SPSS for correlation and descriptive statistics.