Chapter 4: A Meta-Analytic Examination of the Impact of Destructive Leadership and Employee Personality on Employee Subjective Well-Being

Drawing on affective events theory, we examine the impact of destructive leadership and subordinate the Big Five personality (i.e., openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) on subordinates’ subjective well-being (i.e., state positive affect and negative state affect). Specifically, we examine if Big Five personality or destructive leadership are more important predictors of positive and negative subjective well-being. Our relative weight meta-analytic results suggest that destructive leadership predicts more explained variance (i.e., about 71.17%) in negative subjective well-being (overall R2 = 19.3%) than all the Big Five traits (i.e., about 28.83%). Interestingly, we found that Big Five personality predicts more explained variance in positive subjective well-being (i.e., about 77.34%%; overall R2 = 8.5%) than destructive leadership (i.e., about 22.66%). These findings have important implications for the well-being, leadership, and personality literatures because they suggest that destructive leadership is very damaging to our negative subjective well-being, but Big Five personality traits are better predictors of positive subjective well-being. In this meta-analysis, we discuss the implications of these findings, outline our theoretical contributions to the well-being, leadership, and personality literatures, and discuss directions for future research.