Jekyll and Hyde Leadership: Examining the Direct and Vicarious Experiences of Abusive and Ethical Leadership Through a Justice Variability Lens

Drawing on uncertainty management theory and the nascent work on justice variability, we examine employees’ direct and vicarious experiences of abusive supervision and ethical leadership. Conceptualizing the simultaneous display of abusive and ethical leadership styles as a form of justice variability, we suggest that a direct supervisor’s ethical leadership exacerbates, rather than ameliorates, the detrimental effects of his/her abusive supervision on employees’ emotional exhaustion and job performance. We further contend that a similar effect exists when employees vicariously experience leadership interactions involving their direct supervisor and higher level manager, whereby higher level managers’ ethical leadership exacerbates the negative effects of their abusive supervision toward supervisors on those supervisors’ employees’ emotional exhaustion and job performance. We draw the contrast between the direct and vicarious experiences by theorizing justice uncertainty and linking-pin effectiveness uncertainty, respectively, as two distinct theoretical mechanisms that explain the two proposed destructive effects. Using a multisource and multiphase lagged field study and two vignette-based experiments, we find general support for our model. Our research advances the theories of justice variability, vicarious leadership and (in)justice, and supervisors’ linking-pin role effectiveness. We also offer practical insights for managing “Jekyll and Hyde” leadership across organizational hierarchies.