Linking exploitative leadership and employees’ work–family conflict: The roles of employees’ power distance orientation and emotional exhaustion

Abstract

We explored the relationship between exploitative leadership on employees’ work–family conflict, as well as the mediating role of employees’ emotional exhaustion and the moderating role of employees’ power distance orientation in that relationship. Chinese employees (n = 325) working mainly in the manufacturing industry (32.31%) and the information technology industry (24. 92%) self-reported their data. The structural equation model with latent variables results indicated that exploitative leadership positively affected employees’ work–family conflict through emotional exhaustion playing a partial mediating role, which was negatively moderated by employees’ power distance orientation. These findings add to the emerging evidence on how exploitative leadership effects employees’ work–family conflict and the boundary conditions of this effect. Employees with high power distance orientation, who accept the unequal distribution of power among individuals of different ranks, seem more capable of mitigating this impact. This study’s findings have implications for workplace interventions for managing spillover effects of leadership styles in the work domain to employees’ states in the family domain.