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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1503447
This article is part of the Research Topic Creative Organization Development through Leadership View all 20 articles
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Impoverished leadership, as a form of unethical leadership behavior, can have a wide range of negative impacts. It not only affects team morale, work efficiency, cohesion, and trust but also directly influences organizational performance, reputation, and the leader's own career development. However, previous research has rarely explored the antecedents of impoverished leadership. Based on social cognitive theory and conservation of resources theory, this study investigated the impact of error aversion climate on impoverished leadership with mixed methodologies (i.e., a scenario experiment and a questionnaire survey). The results showed that error aversion climate positively influences impoverished leadership; moral disengagement and ego depletion serve as mediators between error aversion climate and impoverished leadership. Besides, regulatory focus moderate the relationship between error aversion climate and moral disengagement (ego depletion). Specifically, when leaders have high prevention regulatory focus and high promotion regulatory focus, the relationship between error aversion climate and moral disengagement (ego depletion) is stronger. Regulatory focus also moderate the indirect effect of error aversion climate on impoverished leadership through moral disengagement (ego depletion). The indirect effect of error aversion climate on impoverished leadership is stronger when leaders have high prevention regulatory focus and high promotion regulatory focus. The findings provide theoretical guidance for interventions to reduce impoverished leadership and offer new insights for promoting organizational sustainability.
Keywords: Impoverished Leadership, Error Aversion Climate, Moral disengagement, Ego Depletion, regulatory focus
Received: 29 Sep 2024; Accepted: 28 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Liu, Liu, Wang, Hu and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Yulei Li, Hunan University of Finance and Economics, Changsha, Hunan, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
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