Leadership Styles and Job Performance: The Impact of Fake Leadership on Organizational Reliability

Various styles of leadership have the potential for positive and negative influence on employees and organization. The monograph offers a new approach and proposes the systematic analysis of negative leadership traits and behaviors through the broadening of existing approaches (based on employees’ orientation and organizational orientation) by analyzing them together with a third dimension: leader’s traits, which will allow us to analyze the intent of the leader. Based on this approach, the monograph introduces the term: fake leadership, characterized by an emphasis on individual goals of the leader (regardless of their importance for the organization) coupled with intentional anti-employees and anti-organizational behaviours. Such leaders operate with intent to engage in negative behaviors towards employees and organization, simultaneously aiming at hiding such intent. The monograph introduces and empirically verifies various models explaining the mechanisms, through which fake leadership negatively influences job performance of employees and organizational reliability based on intraorganizational trust and positive job-related attitudes (work motivation, job satisfaction, work engagement, organizational commitment), as well as negative job-related attitudes (work disengagement, job dissatisfaction, work demotivation), tend to hide errors, which is coupled with the number of management and employees’ errors. These models reference the concept of authentic leadership, which is chosen as a positive alternative to the described fake leadership.

Agnieszka Bieńkowska is a full professor at Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, working at Faculty of Management, in the Department of Management Systems and Organizational Development. She was a Vice-Rector for Teaching of Wroclaw University of Science and Technology. Her scientific career is connected to controlling and its quality and use in contemporary organizations, human resource management and organizational reliability. Recently she is working on the issue of employees’ dynamic capabilities, especially in the context of its value for organization during crisis.

Katarzyna Tworek is an associate professor of Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, working at Faculty of Management, in the Department of Management Systems and Organizational Development. She is a Dean of the Faculty of Management. Her scientific career is connected to the use of IT in management and its support for various management methods, IT reliability and organizational reliability. Recently she is working on the issue of employees’ dynamic capabilities, especially in the context of its value for organization during crisis.