Dear Editor and Reviewers,
We are writing regarding our manuscript, which we submitted to the International Journal of Public Sector Management. The manuscript has been reviewed, and we received many valuable comments from both editor and reviewers. We were so pleased that the journal editor decided to give us a chance to revise the manuscript. We understood that the manuscript would need major revisions to make it suitable for the journal. We took every comment from reviewers seriously. We discussed the comments and questions and rewrote the draft in some parts. We had made significant changes in many parts, mainly in the introduction. We aimed to bring the sense of public sector management into the discussion. Also, we added some details from the public sector management perspective, including in the discussion and implication sections. We do hope that the revised version of the manuscript will be appropriate for the journal. Please let us know if anything we should do to make the manuscript even better and more suitable for the subsequent publication. Here we respond to reviewers' comments:
Responses to reviewer 1,
No. Comments Responses
1 The research design is not clear on the variables and how the design connects.
We revised the introduction section to add more details on the variables. We emphasised that the toxic leadership we studied was individual-level, and the data were collected from individual employees (i.e., follower-rating). In this way, the study aims to collect and analyse data from the
individual level, not at the organisational level.
2 Hypothesis 2 is not explained, only listed
We initially assumed the journal audience would be able to catch the idea from our previous literature review.
However, after considering your comments, we have added more details and described the mediation model before stating hypothesis 2.
3 As a reader, I am not clear on what is being studied. Is it turnover? is it toxic
leadership? transactional or relational? is it the impact of toxic leadership impact on turnover? is it turnover on resisting toxic leadership?
The study aims to investigate the effect of toxic leadership on turnover intention and counterproductive work
behaviours (CWB). We emphasised this aim in the abstract, introduction, and discussion. The study was intended to reveal the consistent negative impact of toxic leadership on employees' intention to quit and their CWB. However, to understand the relationship, we employed a psychological contract perspective. In addition, in this revised form, we brought the idea of social interactions and toxic
relationships between leaders and followers, which causes adverse employee outcomes.
4 What is the unit of analysis- the individuals surveyed? or the toxic leaders? or the organisation?
We collected and analysed responses from employees and asked their perceptions about their immediate leader's (toxic) behaviours. I assumed this was an individual level analysis where we collected responses from each employee.
Our results reflected the mechanism at the individual level.
Although it could influence the whole organisation (as we suggested in the manuscript), our data described the process at individual-level interactions between leader and follower.
5 The literature covered is primarily psychology and the business sector. Yet the research design draws on a public sector sampling. The research on public sector leadership, e.g. Van Wart, 't Hart, Jean Hartley, and others are missing
In the initial draft, we tended to present the argument from a psychological perspective. However, after considering comments from reviewers and suggestions from editors, we agreed that the arguments and ideas from public
organisation studies should be further considered. As advised, we dug more literature from public sector
literature. We also included papers suggested by reviewers.
In line with what had been mentioned by the editor, studies about toxic leadership in public sector management are still
scarce, and this manuscript is one of a few studies in this area.
6 The discussion on public sector organisations is brief and simply asserts
similarities. There is also research on toxic leadership in the public sector, see for example George Reed and an article by another author in the International Journal of Public leadership.
In the introduction and discussion section, we have included more discussion towards public sector management. We believe that the current form of the manuscript contains more arguments about public sector management.
We have cited literature as suggested; however, we viewed those previous studies were more exclusive than inclusive.
They exclusively investigated toxic behaviours in one public organisation at the organisational and cultural levels. In contrast, our idea was to bring leaders' dark/ destructive behaviours into the general public sector literature and focus on more individual-level interactions.
7 Much of the literature cited is more 10 years old
We have updated our literature and included more current literature. For the record, most studies about toxic,
destructive, and abusive leadership were conducted in non- specific organisation types (e.g., public). Many studies collected data from various sources where the types of the organisations were not their interest.
8 The limits of the sample are not discussed- what was the response rate by hospitals, transportation and the other public sector organisations?
For the record, collecting data from public organisations was very challenging for researchers. We followed ethical guidelines in Indonesia and ensured no violation of privacy occurred when we conducted our study. Given those
challenges, a 61% response rate was an achievement for our team. We also have included the response rate for each organisation. Please be advised that there was a lengthy process to convince these organisations that their data would not be shared with other parties except for research purposes.
9 Does the differences in public sector employment have significance for the findings?
Also, after considering this comment, we ran an analysis to identify if different types of public organisations had significant differences. We included the results in the participant section to convince the readers that the differences between organisations were not significant.
10 The paper reads like a summary of a research method, illustrated by a specific application. More explanation of the findings, and then the implications could be developed. But most of all, the research questions need to be developed from gaps in the research on the PUBLIC
As mentioned earlier, we revised the introduction and discussion sections to bring more public sector
management ideas. We also revised the implication section to include suggestions for public sector practitioners.
sector not the business sector
11 The topics are important and the potential correlation between turnover and toxic leadership is potentially important in the public sector- but this manuscript would need significant and major revisions to address these issues in the context of the public sector
Yes, we agree that the topic is important for both scholars and practitioners in public sector management. We added more details to emphasise the context of public sector management.
Responses to reviewer 2,
No. Comments Responses
1 First, the authors must make a clear and more compelling case for precisely which gap in the public administration literature they hope to fill. What are the study's unique contributions to our understanding of leadership in public organisations? The authors make scant mention of leadership and its
challenges in public organisations or to the relevant literature on the topic. As it reads now, the manuscript seems more appropriate for a generic management journal.
First, we were pleased to receive your constructive comments because we could view our manuscript from a public
administration perspective. Initially, we planned to submit our paper to generic management journals. However, we found that the topic would be more suitable for public administration journals. In addition, the idea of toxic leadership still receives less attention in this area.
To respond to your comments, we have made some significant changes to the manuscript. The introduction section had been rewritten, and public sector leadership had been discussed. We included more literature from public administration journals and discussed the issue from a public administration leadership perspective. However, we still included the idea of toxic
leadership from a general perspective and tried to build our argument based on general and public administration leadership.
2 The authors must provide a much better explanation of why and how toxic
leadership can breach the psychological
contract. More
fundamentally, why did the authors choose turnover intention as the mediator and not more proximate employee attitudes like
We have made major changes to our literature review section.
We seriously considered your comments when revising the literature review section.
withdrawal, job satisfaction, and organisational
commitment, or perhaps even occupational burnout and stress? The choice of turnover intention seems rather arbitrary and requires further justification.
3 Turning to the methods, why did the authors choose this measure of toxic
leadership? Some
explanation is required given the availability of other measures. The same goes for their measure of turnover intention. What happens to the results when the respondents who were dropped from the analysis because they failed the attention check are included? Are the findings sensitive to the decision of whom to include?
For the measures, we have included the reasons to choose each measure. Generally, we chose the measure because of the evidence of validity and reliability, and they represented the construct being measured. For instance, the toxic leadership measure was chosen because it represented a wide variety of behaviours perpetrated by a toxic leader.
Secondly, due to the Covid-19 situation, we collected the data using an online platform. As suggested by many scholars, some participants might carelessly participate in the study. Dropping these careless participants would increase our confidence that we only included participants who seriously participated in the study. We have performed ANOVA to identify if our variables were sensitive to different data sources. We did not find any significant differences, and it seemed the variables were consistent across different locations and sources. We have added this exploratory analysis in our method section.
4 In regards to discriminant
and convergent validity, the authors must apply the more rigorous Fornell and Larcker (1981) test using AVE's and inter-factor correlations.
We had provided all necessary information regarding the validity and reliability of the measure. In addition, we also had included the measurement model validity to ensure that the theoretical model was supported before we further interpreted the relationships between variables.
We were sure that we had included all these in our initial draft for the AVE and discriminant validity. We followed Fornell and Larker in analysing the model. Based on the AVE and
discriminant validity, we believed that we had enough evidence to support the construct validity and discriminant validity of the measurement model.
5 Also, are the findings substantively significant and meaningful? The effect sizes appear to be rather small.
We appreciated your comments regarding the effect size.
However, the way we view effect size was contextual rather than statistical. We understood that there was a widely used standard of effect size (e.g., Cohen's d and Pearson's r).
However, the interpretation of the effect size could vary from one context to another (Funder & Ozer, 2019). In this study, a small effect size could mean a serious discovery that needs further attention. We investigated a form of power abuse in which a small fraction of this behaviour could bring cascading impact to the whole system in the organisation.
Although we had a different perspective about effect size, we have explained the limitation related to the effect size and future research direction in the revised version.
6 And finally, and on a more minor note, the reader should be able to see all of the survey items for these scales in an appendix and not have to dig up articles cited in the manuscript to assess the construct validity of the measures used in the analysis.
We had provided some examples of the items in the method section. We were afraid that we were not able to reveal the original items due to copyright policy. However, we are willing to share the translated version of the scale for those who contact the corresponding author.
Again, thank you for considering our manuscript for publication. We read and fully considered the comments from reviewers. The main point of the review was to bring the sense of Public Service Management into the discussion. Also, we have an intention to introduce the readers to the dark side of leadership in the public service sphere. We hope this manuscript will serve as one of the primary references in discussing toxic leadership in public service organisations.
References
Funder, D. C., & Ozer, D. J. (2019). Evaluating Effect Size in Psychological Research: Sense and Nonsense.
Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 2(2), 156–168.
https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245919847202
International Journal of Public Sector Management
THE EFFECT OF TOXIC LEADERSHIP ON TURNOVER INTENTION AND COUNTERPRODUCTIVE WORK BEHAVIOUR
IN INDONESIA PUBLIC ORGANISATIONS
Journal: International Journal of Public Sector Management Manuscript ID IJPSM-06-2021-0142.R1
Manuscript Type: Original Article
Keywords: toxic leadership, turnover intention, counterproductive work behaviours, psychological contract, public organisation
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ijpsm International Journal of Public Sector Management
International Journal of Public Sector Management
1 THE EFFECT OF TOXIC LEADERSHIP ON TURNOVER INTENTION AND
COUNTERPRODUCTIVE WORK BEHAVIOUR IN INDONESIA PUBLIC ORGANISATIONS: THE ROLE OF TURNOVER INTENTION STRUCTURED ABSTRACT
Purpose – Leadership has been known for its tremendous impact on employees’ outcomes in any organisations. Constructive leadership positively impacts employees, while destructive leadership causes counterproductive work behaviours (CWB). This study aims to investigate a mechanism in which toxic leadership contributes to employees’ CWB via the role of turnover intention by employing the psychological contract theory.
Design/Methodology/Approach – The participants were recruited using various recruitment methods such as online recruitment and alumni networks. After dropping some participants who failed to complete the three-wave data collection procedure, 457 responses were used for the final data analysis. The participants came from diverse various public organisations in Indonesia (e.g., , including hospitals , school, university, and public transport
departmentoffices).
Findings – The results found that the effect of toxic leadership on employees’ CWB was mediated by the role of turnover intention. Under a toxic leader, employees might intend to leave the organisations and commit CWB This study confirmed the application of
psychological contract theory. Employees in Indonesian public organisations might withhold their retaliatory behaviours against the leader’s toxicity due to a high power distance
orientation. However, aas the mistreatments continuously occur and employees perceive psychological contract breach, they might prefer to leave the organisation and reduce their performance.
Research Implications – Firstly, public organisations should implement some strategies to reduce the emergence of toxic behaviours. Secondly, public organisations should evaluate and examine how leadership is practised within public organisations. Lastly, the
organisations must ensure that their leaders do not breach employees’ psychological contracts.
Originality – This study has highlighted a mechanism of the effect of toxic leadership on CWB in public service organisations by employing a psychological contract theory and a power distance perspective.
Keywords: toxic leadership, turnover intention, counterproductive work behaviours, psychological contract, and public organisation
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2 INTRODUCTION
Leadership is one of the most pivotal elements in any organisations. A myriad of studies suggested that positive and constructive leadership promote productive work behaviours, employee’s well-being, and organisational success, such as transformational leadership and authentic leadership. To illustrate, transformational leadership has been known for its tremendous positive impact on desirable employees’ outcomes in organisations
(Barling et al., 1996; Braun et al., 2013; Nusair et al., 2012). Similarly, authentic leadership also positively impacts employees’ positive outcomes and organisational success (Daraba et al., 2021; Gardner et al., 2011; Zubair & Kamal, 2015).Also, ethical leaders’ behaviours determined many positive employees’ outcomes in many organisations (Bormann, 2017;
Bouckenooghe et al., 2015; Palanski et al., 2014).
Leaders in public sectors are the source of leadership, while followers are the object of the leader behaviours (Ospina, 2008). In public sectors, leaders are expected to show some desired behaviours while followers must constructively respond to the behaviours (Boin & ’T Hart, 2003). At the individual level, leadership in the public sector also involves leader- follower interactions. This relational process is pivotal in leadership as the nature of leadership involves social interactions within a context (Clark et al., 2014). This relational process is shaped by leaders and those they interact with (Hartley, 2018). In some situations, leaders need to foster some political astuteness to control this dyadic relationship in public sectors (Hartley et al., 2019; Ricard et al., 2017).This positive path between constructive leadership and desirable employees’ outcomes also persist in some public organisations.
Evidence in this area has highlighted the importance of positive leaders’ behaviours for public service organisations. For instance, Transformational leadership was the antecedent of many desirable employee outcomes (Braun et al., 2013; Pugar & Parahyanti, 2018; Tims et al., 2011). A recent investigation found that leaders with authentic style positively influenced employees’ work engagement in public organisations during the corona pandemic (Daraba et al., 2021). Also, ethical leaders’ behaviours determined many positive employees’ outcomes in many organisations (Bormann, 2017; Bouckenooghe et al., 2015; Palanski et al., 2014).
Understanding leadership in a public sphere is challenging and complex because the actors need to balance between the administrative requirement and the increasing dynamic circumstances (Murphy et al., 2017). In the process of balancing demands and requirements, leaders potentially act aggressively, particularly when they experience resource depletion, abusive climate, and high-performance systems in the workplace (Aryee et al., 2008; Rice et al., 2020; Sharma, 2018; Tepper et al., 2011). Some scholars had indicated the positive impact of leadership in public sectors (Alimo‐Metcalfe & Alban‐Metcalfe, 2006; Anne Loewenberger et al., 2014; Luu, 2016; Ugaddan & Park, 2017). In the last five years, more studies found the negative effect of destructive leader behaviours in public organisations (Gabriel, 2016; Khan et al., 2020; Park et al., 2020; Subramaniam et al., 2015; Vogel et al., 2016).
Regardless of the types of organisations, This positive path between constructive leadership and desirable employees’ outcomes also persist in some public
organisations.Nevertheless, constructive leadership should not be seen as the only type of leadership within organisations. lLeaders with destructive behaviours deteriorate organisation performance and negatively affect employees’ mental health (Erickson et al., 2015; Nyberg et
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International Journal of Public Sector Management
3 al., 2011; Shaw et al., 2014; Woestman & Wasonga, 2015). Destructive leadership is not the only term used to describe leaders with deviant behaviours. Some forms of destructive leadership also raise some concerns from both scholars and practitioners. These sScholars have used many terms to describe a leader’s destructive behaviours such as abusive supervision or abusive supervisory behaviours (Tepper, 2000)(Tepper et al., 2017), toxic leadership (Pelletier, 2010), supervisor incivility (Johnson & Indvik, 2001), and the dark side of leadership (Mathieu et al., 2014).
Unlike the other forms of destructive and dysfunctional leadership, toxic leadership appears to be more inclusive in terms of the type of behaviours and its destructive effects (MacLennan, 2017; Mehta & Maheshwari, 2013; Singh et al., 2017; Yi Chua et al., 2015).
Mehta and Maheshwari (2013) found that the construct included abusiveness, promoting inequity, and lack of integrity which were exclusively covered by other forms of abusive leadership (e.g., abusive supervision). Lipman-Blumen (2008), Mehta and Maheshwari (2013), and Mehta and Maheshwari (2013) postulated that toxic leadership could cause a destructive effect on employees’ mental health and performance, and attenuate organisation performance. Toxic leader’s behaviours could emerge from the highest-level position (e.g., director) to the lowest-level leadership position (e.g., supervisor).
While all types of destructive leadership could cause harm to employees and
organisations, the emergence of toxic leadership might destruct not only the leader-follower dyadic relationship but also the whole mechanism of leadership. Following Murphy’s et al.
(2017) argument, leadership in public sectors is complex because it departs from lower-level social interactions (i.e., leader-follower relationship) to a higher administrative system (i.e., state and national policies). Unlike positive leader behaviours (e.g., charismatic leadership), leader’s toxic behaviours are contagious, and their negative effects could cascade and influence the whole leadership process (Jiang & Gu, 2016; Wo et al., 2019).
Toxic leadership in the public sector has been studied exclusively in military organisations where the forces adopted unique military values, and they tended to tolerate toxic behaviours perpetrated by their supervisors (Reed & Bullis, 2014). However, in many public organisations, those behaviours are less accepted and potentially deteriorate leader- follower social interactions, which could cause detrimental effects to employees’ well-being, attitude, and performance (Bansal & Malhotra, 2018; Gabriel, 2016; Vogel et al., 2016; Zaabi et al., 2018). Interestingly, while in many organisations, a leader’s toxicity caused unpleasant experiences to employees (Pelletier, 2010), Reed and Bullis (2014) found no significant impact of supervisor’s toxicity on follower’s retention. Thus, this study raised a question regarding how leader’s toxic behaviours influence employees’ intention to quit and eventually trigger employees’ counterproductive work behaviours.
The link between a leader’s behaviours and an employee’s intention to quit was evident in many studies (Pradhan, Srivastava, & Jena, 2019; Rahim & Cosby, 2016; Seo &
Chung, 2019; S. Xu et al., 2018). For instance, abusive supervision increased employees’
turnover intention (Ahmad & Begum, 2020; Mathieu & Babiak, 2016; Pradhan, Srivastava, &
Jena, 2019; Richard et al., 2020). On the contrary, some positive leadership styles tended to reduce the emergence of turnover intention (Amunkete & Rothmann, 2015; Sun & Wang, 2017). Toxic leadership could have increased employees' intention to quit, as leaders with
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