When the victim becomes vicious: Combined effects of pseudo transformational leadership and epistemic motivation on contempt and deviant behaviors

Utilizing affective events theory (Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996), the current study unravels how and when pseudo-transformational leaders promote contempt, avoidance, and aggression. Specifically, we examined whether pseudo-transformational leadership enforces feelings of contempt, which, in turn, fosters interaction avoidance and covert aggression in followers. We hypothesized that contempt also has an indirect effect that is contingent on levels of epistemic motivation of followers. By adopting a multi-wave research design, we gathered data from 277 employees of the service sector of Pakistan. The results signified that followers of pseudo-transformational leaders feel contemptuous of them and respond with interaction avoidance and indirect aggression. Further, we found that the impact of pseudo-transformational leadership on contempt was more pronounced in individuals with higher levels of epistemic motivation. We believe that this study opens up a new avenue in the pseudo-transformational leadership literature by highlighting the mechanism and conditions under which such leaders are deleterious for organizations.