Self-centered leadership and work alienation: A negative social exchange perspective

This paper demonstrates that self-centered leadership behaviors negatively affect the quality of social exchange between the employee and the organization, thus affecting the employee's experience of work alienation. In particular, it proposes that the employee's perceived organizational obstruction and dehumanization sequentially mediate the association between self-centered leadership behaviors and alienation. It examines work alienation in the rarely tapped context of the Egyptian organization and takes into consideration the cultural specialties of the Arab leadership behaviors. This study has collected primary data through questionnaires and used valid and reliable measurement scales. It conducted confirmatory factor analysis, measurement invariance, common method bias test and structural equation modeling in order to analyze the proposed empirical model. The findings reveal that the personalistic and individualistic behaviors of the self-centered leaders are associated with perceived organizational obstruction, dehumanization and work alienation.