The impact of leader depletion on leader performance: the mediating role of leaders’ trust beliefs and employees’ citizenship behaviors

The leadership role can be demanding and depleting. Using self-regulation and social exchange theory as a framework, we developed a three-step sequential mediation model that explains how feelings of depletion can degrade leaders’ own performance level, via the reciprocating behavior of their employees. Specifically, we hypothesized that leader depletion is negatively related to their trust beliefs. This lack of trust is expected to be reciprocated by employees in such a way that they display less citizenship behaviors towards their leader. These lowered citizenship behaviors are, in turn, predicted to negatively impact leader performance. Additionally, we hypothesized that these negative effects of feeling depleted are more pronounced for leaders who believe that their willpower is limited. Studies 1 and 2 illustrated that leader depletion indirectly influences their own performance level through leaders’ trust beliefs and employees’ leader-directed citizenship behaviors. Study 3 extended these findings from the inter-individual to the intra-individual level, and demonstrated the predicted moderating role of belief in limited willpower. Together, our studies provide new and useful insights in the broader, more distal implications of leader depletion, which have not yet been considered in existing self-regulation models.