A Breath of Toxic Air: The Relationship Between Appraised Air Pollution, Abusive Supervision, and Laissez-Faire Leadership Through the Dual-Mediating Pathways of Negative Affect and Somatic Complaints

Khan, U, Patel, C and Barnes, C (2023) A Breath of Toxic Air: The Relationship Between Appraised Air Pollution, Abusive Supervision, and Laissez-Faire Leadership Through the Dual-Mediating Pathways of Negative Affect and Somatic Complaints. Journal of Applied Psychology. ISSN 0021-9010 (In Press)

Abstract

Air pollution has become a global public health hazard leading to debilitating effects on physical, mental, and emotional health. Management research has just begun to explore the effects of air pollution on employees’ work life. Drawing from the transactional theory of stress (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) and crossover theory (Westman, 2001), we argue that appraisal of air pollution is an important factor that influences leaders and their behavior with subordinates. Specifically, we propose that when leaders appraise severe air pollution, they are more likely to behave abusively toward their subordinates and engage in laissez-faire leadership. We also propose that this relationship is mediated by leaders’ experience of somatic complaints and negative affect. We test our model using an experience sampling study in India of leaders and followers who were located in different cities from each other. Overall, our results highlight how air pollution appraisals can harm not only the leader experiencing the pollution but also subordinates of those leaders. In other words, our counterintuitive finding is that subordinates may be harmed by air pollution to which they are not even directly exposed.