Leader-Member Exchange Quality as Mediator Between Toxic Leadership and Organizational Learning in Pakistani Banks

Abstract

The twenty-first century is shaded with numerous scams that linked to the leadership decisions. Such incidents raise the questions on the ability and intentions of the leadership that whether they were intentionally involved or these were the results of their negligence, incompetence or inability to manage. Leadership has been interesting, attracting and remain an important topic for the academician as well as business personnel. It’s been years that leadership is being studies and majority of scholars just focus on the constructive side of the leadership but the darkest and negative traits or behaviours of leaders are not studies. One such behaviour is toxic leadership. The available literature identifies that investigation related to toxic leader and organizational learning with the mediating role of leader-member exchange quality is limited. The current study explored the mediating role of leader-member exchange quality between toxic leadership and organizational learning in the banking sector of Islamabad, Pakistan. The study is cross-sectional in nature and convenient sampling technique was employed to collect the data from the individual bankers working in banking sector of Islamabad. A total of 214 responses were collected through survey questionnaire developed in google form, for the convenience of data collection and respondents. 3 responses were deleted due to the duplication and 211 responses were used for the study. The descriptive statistics, correlation, linear regression and process macro v4.0 by Andrew F. Hayes were employed for the data analysis. The coefficient of correlation revealed the significant negative relationship of toxic leadership with the organizational learning and leadermember exchange quality and significant positive relationship of leader-member exchange quality with the organizational learning. The study findings justify that toxic leadership damages the process of organizational learning and leader-member exchange quality mediates the relationship between toxic leadership and organizational learning. The current study is unique as it explored the mediating role of leader-member exchange quality between the toxic leadership and organizational learning. The study further discusses the implications for the banks and practitioners to deal effectively with the toxicity of leaders at different levels.