The Interpersonal Effects of Perfectionism in Organizations

Abstract

Of the key challenges confronting organizational leaders, none is as important and timely as the ability to motivate sustainable high performance in employees. Meta-analytic evidence reveals that current economic and organizational environments contribute to the rise of leader perfectionism - a personality style that refers to the propensity to strive for extremely high standards of performance and to engage in harsh evaluations directed against the self and others (Curran & Hill, 2019, p. 413; Frost et al., 1990; Hewitt & Flett, 1990). Despite the growing interest in perfectionism, organizational scholars have only recently begun to explore the role of perfectionism in key organizational phenomena. On the one hand, anecdotal evidence from practitioner literature demonstrates that leader perfectionism supports employee productivity. On the other hand, growing empirical evidence indicates that leader perfectionism stifles interpersonal relations at work. The primary objective of this dissertation is to reconcile conflicting perspectives and findings about how leader perfectionism exerts its influence in organizational life.

My dissertation synthesizes the expanding perfectionism literature, develops a conceptual model of how and when perfectionism shapes leadership effectiveness, and tests this model in four empirical studies. Specifically, I first synthesize the nascent yet fragmented perfectionism literature to integrate key theoretical perspectives and empirical findings relevant to organizational research. Second, building on the systematic review, I develop a new conceptual model that identifies the conditions and mechanisms that underlie the link between leader perfectionism and follower outcomes. Based on the Theory of Individual Differences in Task and Contextual Performance (Motowidlo et al., 1997) and the Emotions as Social Information Theory (Van Kleef, 2009), I propose that leader perfectionism can influence followers in both positive and negative directions depending on leader's ability to regulate their emotions. Perfectionistic leaders with relatively low (vs. high) emotion regulation ability are more likely to be perceived as abusive, and that this, in turn, has important implications for followers' work behaviors. Finally, I test these ideas in four programmatic mixed-method studies with a combined sample of 1,441 individuals from multiple national cultures. Study 1 and 2 present preregistered experimental studies to probe the causal relationship in my proposed model by manipulating a confederate leader's perfectionism and emotion regulation ability to test its effects on followers' task performance via abusive supervision. Study 3 and 4 consist of multi-wave and multi-source field studies involving leaders, their direct followers, and their followers' co-workers to examine how the interactive relationship between leaders' perfectionism and emotional regulation ability influences followers' in-role performance, workplace deviance, and turnover via abusive supervision. The results support the hypothesized interactive effect of leader perfectionism and emotion regulation ability on abusive supervision, as well as the conditional indirect effect such that abusive supervision mediates the interactive effect of leader perfectionism and emotion regulation ability on follower work outcomes.

To date, my dissertation represents one of the first key investigations of the interpersonal consequences of leadership perfectionism in the workplace. The findings of this research break new ground not only by bringing the theory of perfectionism into the fold of leadership research, but also by fundamentally shifting our understanding of how perfectionism shapes leader effectiveness. I discuss the theoretical and practical contributions of the research in detail along with its limitations.