DESTRUCTIVE LEADER EVALUATIONS AND THEIR NOMOLOGICAL NETWORK: A SECOND ORDER META-ANALYTIC REVIEW

Recent scholarly attention has turned towards evaluations of harmful or “dark” leadership traits and behaviors. However, prevailing literature on destructive leaders primarily delves into leader-centric evaluations of traits, antecedents, and consequences, leaving a significant gap in understanding follower-driven perspectives on evaluations of destructive leaders. This study advocates for a second-order meta-analysis (SOMA) to scrutinize the interplay between evaluations of destructive leaders, the nomological network of concepts surrounding such evaluations, and the relative importance of potential predictors of such evaluations. While primary meta-analytic inquiries abound in the field, their findings sometimes present conflicting results, necessitating a secondary meta-analytic exploration encompassing diverse variables, including follower traits and various manifestations of destructive leadership. This dissertation takes stock of the limitations and opportunities in the extant literature. It presents a roadmap for a cleaned-up concept space, which will allow more robust future research by systematically searching through 256 articles and retaining 30 articles for the initial inclusion before additional searches to fill the remaining SOMA effect size estimates in the correlates in matrices for follower and leader individual differences, leadership construct correlates, and potential outcomes of DLB. Although I successfully coded over 37 follower differences, 68 DLB outcomes, and five destructive leadership constructs as correlates, many missing correlates were primarily tied to outcome relationships, demographics, and personality measures. These missing correlates were initially substantial, with over 70% of the meta-analytic correlation matrices bank. Moreover, the selection process prioritized meta-analytic estimates with the largest sample sizes to mitigate random sampling errors, resulting in comprehensive matrices comprising 182 meta-analytic estimates (total k = 10,818 & total sample size (n) = 2,384,935) not including any Metabus.org derived meta-analytic estimates. Some key statistically significant results include a robust model using eleven follower individual differences (i.e., gender, age, race, five-factor personality traits, positive affect, narcissism, trait anger) with R2 = 0.239 and all incremental correlate additions measured by Change in R Squared with p < 0.05 for all predictor additions excluding age and gender variables. Also, the relative weights and regression coefficients supported these findings. Emotional Stability emerged as a dominant predictor across the personality and demographic traits for followers at RW% = 0.46 with a coefficient β = - 0.652, p < 0.001. Additionally, Trait Anger yielded RW% = 0.23 with a coefficient β = - 0.514, p < 0.001. Additionally, this study suggests the most robust leadership construct relationships to destructive leadership, ethical leadership with ρ = - 0.63 (k = 2; n = 8,186), and unethical leadership ρ = 0.58 (k = 3, n = 2,702).