A Meta-Analysis of the Role of Destructive Leadership and Personality on Subjective Well-Being

Drawing on affective events theory, we examine the impact of destructive leadership and subordinate personality (i.e., the Big Five traits of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) on subordinates’ subjective well-being (i.e., positive and negative state affect). Consistent with affective events theory, we examine if personality (a stable disposition) or destructive leadership (a work event) are more important predictors of positive versus negative subjective well-being. Our results suggest that destructive leadership predicts more explained variance (i.e., about 70.518%) in negative subjective well-being than all the Big Five traits (i.e., about 29.482%). Interestingly, we found that personality predicts more explained variance in positive subjective well-being (i.e., about 76.190%) than destructive leadership (i.e., about 23.810%). These findings have important implications for the leadership, well-being, and affective events theory literatures because they suggest that destructive leadership is very damaging to our negative subjective well-being, but less impactful for our positive subjective well-being. In this meta-analysis, we discuss the implications for these findings on affective events theory and the leadership and well-being literatures.