This study aims to explore how employees’ ingratiation leads to managers’ exploitative leadership through their feeling of psychological entitlement. The study also ascertains whether this indirect relationship is contingent on managers’ moral identity.
The data were collected from 523 employees through survey design. Employees rated their colleagues for their ingratiating behavior along with rating their managers for their moral identity, psychological entitlement and exploitative leadership.
Employees’ ingratiation was found to relate to psychological entitlement. Additionally, psychological entitlement mediated the relationship between ingratiation and manager exploitative leadership. This indirect relationship was moderated by the moral identity of managers. Moral identity was also found to moderate the relationship between ingratiation and psychological entitlement. Finally, the study found psychological entitlement to be related to exploitative leadership.
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to explore the previously unexplored direct relationships between ingratiation and psychological entitlement and psychological entitlement and exploitative leadership. The study is also the first to explicate the mediating role of psychological entitlement and the moderating role of moral identity relating ingratiation to exploitative leadership.
