Antecedents of Dark Leadership: Empirical Evidence from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Police Department

Abstract

This research aimed at investigating determinants of Dark Leadership Behavior
phenomenon demonstrated during the leaders and followers relations. The
research evolved around establishing relationship between narcissism,
Machiavellianism, hubris, abusive style of supervision and unpredictability, with
dark leadership behavior amongst the leader-and followers’ interaction in Police
department of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Survey was used for collection of data about
the predictors and dependent variable through a self administered adopted
instrument with 54 items, from the serving police officials (n-600) with 73% return
rate. Reliability and validity checks were done Cronbatch Alpha, face/ construct
validity followed by a pilotstudy. Exploratory Factor Analysis(EFA) operationalized
the indicators of all constructs using SPSS 25.0. Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
along with Varimax rotation were used to extract all latent constructs. The results
show that all the determinants of dark leadership have higher than recommended
value of 0.7 however, narcissism, hubris and abusive supervision, amongst the six
determinants, are the most significant predictors followed by authoritarian style
and unpredictability of the leader. Item-to-total correlation has found satisfactory
results. PLS SEM was employed for analyses and all of the proposed hypotheses
were found accepted