The Influence of Authoritarian-Benevolent Leadership on Subordinates’ Work Engagement: A Social Information Processing Perspective

PURPOSE: The dynamic and complex external environment calls for leaders to be both benevolent and authoritarian to cope with the mutually exclusive demands in the management process. But few research paid attention to the dark side of leaders’ inconsistent behaviors on employees’ work outcomes. Based on social information processing theory, this study investigated the impact of authoritarian-benevolent leadership on subordinates’ work engagement and explored the mediating role of leader-member exchange ambivalence and the moderating role of trait mindfulness. METHODS: A two-wave time-lagged survey approach was employed and data from 309 employees from three Chinese companies were collected. R 4.2.1 and SPSS 26.0 were used to test our hypotheses. RESULTS: The findings demonstrated how subordinates were influenced in their work engagement by authoritarian-benevolent leadership and leader-member exchange ambivalence and emphasized the value of maintaining a high level of trait mindfulness. This study indicated that (1) authoritarian-benevolent leadership was negatively associated with work engagement, which was mediated by leader-member exchange ambivalence; (2) subordinates’ trait mindfulness moderated the relationship between leader-member exchange ambivalence and work engagement; (3) the indirect effect of authoritarian-benevolent leadership on subordinates’ work engagement through leader-member exchange ambivalence was moderated by subordinates’ trait mindfulness. CONCLUSION: This study reveals the dark side of authoritarian-benevolent leadership and deepens our understanding of the mechanism underlying the effect of authoritarian-benevolent leadership on subordinates’ work engagement from a new theoretical perspective. Practical implications are provided for managers to effectively develop authoritarian-benevolent leadership skills and improve subordinates’ work engagement.