Consequences of collective-focused and differentiated individual-focused leadership – Development and testing of an organizational-level model

Recent advances in leadership research suggest that collective-focused leadership climate and differentiated individual-focused leadership might simultaneously, yet oppositely, affect collective outcomes. The present study extends this literature by addressing open questions regarding theory, methods, statistics, and level of analysis. Therefore, a new and more parsimonious theoretical model is developed on the organizational-level of analysis. Drawing on the commitment literature, we argue for opposite relations of the two leadership constructs on the affective organizational commitment climate. We subsequently theorize that contingent-reward leadership climate moderates these opposing relationships, making our study the first in this field to investigate moderators. Last, we reason that organizational effectiveness is enhanced when affective commitment is “put into action” and raises the organizational citizenship behavior climate. Our three-path moderated-mediation hypotheses are tested, and supported, by structural equation modeling analyses in a multisource data set containing 16,911 respondents from 157 companies. Extensive alternative model testing shows that our theory and findings are robust.