Julian Barling

Queen's University | QueensU · School of Business

Leadership research has a long and impressive history of identifying how followers are affected by their leaders. The vast majority of this research has addressed one leadership “style” at a time, reinforcing the idea that leaders are consistent in their behaviors despite emerging evidence to the contrary. Drawing on uncertainty management theory,...

Introduction: Research exploring the relationship between transformational leadership and safety has used transformational leadership in context-free (e.g., "general transformational leadership," or GTL) and context-specific forms (e.g., "safety-specific transformational leadership," or SSTL), assuming these constructs are theoretically and empiri...

Purpose Why some people are motivated to become leaders is important both conceptually and practically. Motivation to lead compels people to seek out leadership roles and is a distinct predictor of leader role occupancy. The goal of our research is to determine contextual (socioeconomic status and parenting quality), interpersonal (sociometric stat...

Purpose Given the role leaders play in organizational effectiveness, there is growing interest in understanding the antecedents of leader emergence. The authors consider parental influence by examining how witnessing interparental violence during adolescence indirectly affects adult leader role occupancy. Drawing on the work–home resources (W-HR) m...

We investigate the extent to which transformational leadership behaviors enacted by team members—shared transformational leadership—relate to safety behaviors of team members, teams, and team leaders. We also consider the role of perceived organizational support in moderating the relationships between shared transformational leadership and safety b...

In this study, we examine the relationship between abusive supervision and employee retaliatory behaviours. We conceptualize retaliation as both in-kind retaliation (i.e., supervisor-directed aggression) and intensified retaliation (i.e., supervisor-directed violence) to abusive supervision. We explore whether organizational intolerance of aggressi...

Introduction This study investigated the extent to which five human resource management (HRM) practices—systematic selection, extensive training, performance appraisal, high relative compensation, and empowerment—simultaneously predicted later organizational-level injury rates. Methods Specifically, the association between these HRM practices (ass...

Large segments of society stigmatize sex work as ‘dirty’ because of the moral dubiousness and physical danger associated with its conduct. Drawing on social exchange and self-determination theories, we investigated the relationship between perceptions of physical danger at work and desire to leave sex work as an occupation among 321 female sex work...

Purpose This paper investigates the extent to which disability type contributes to differential evaluation of employees by managers. In particular, the authors examined managerial prejudice against 3 disability diagnoses (i.e. psychiatric, physical disability and pending diagnosis) compared to a control group in a return-to-work scenario. Design/m...

The effect of sleep on work is now receiving appropriate research attention, yet most results have been based on community (i.e., nonclinical) populations. Based on previous findings that clinical treatment for diagnosed obstructive sleep apnea benefits sleep quality, we hypothesized that sleep quality would mediate the effects of such treatment on...

This chapter focuses on the nature and consequences of a passion for leadership. The construct of passion for leadership is presented, as is a model of its potential behavioral and psychological consequences. More specifically, drawing from the dualistic model of passion, the chapter explains how harmonious and obsessive passion for leadership may...

Why leaders behave the way they do is of considerable importance. Our goal in this research was to understand how family‐to‐work conflict and romantic relationship conflict influence two different forms of destructive leadership, namely abusive supervision and passive leadership. To do so, we invoke the conservation of resources theory. 123 leader‐...

Passive leadership is attracting empirical interest with the detrimental effects of this type of leadership on a broad array of individual and organizational outcomes becoming apparent. However, just why leaders would engage in this type of nonleadership has received less research attention. We investigate whether and how leaders' attention deficit...

The goal of this study was to examine the costs associated with witnessing the sexual harassment of a male colleague. More specifically, we investigate (a) whether observed male gender harassment is related to psychological and physical health, and negative and positive job-related behaviors and attitudes, and (b) the mediating roles of discrete ne...

Long a focus of research on psychological well-being, mindfulness is now attracting empirical interest in the organisational sciences and we investigate whether and how leaders’ trait mindfulness is associated with transformational leadership. Drawing upon mindfulness and social learning theories, we hypothesise that leaders’ trait mindfulness is a...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of leaders’ attachment orientation and social self-efficacy on the enactment of abusive supervision. Design/methodology/approach: Data were obtained from a sample of leader-subordinate dyads (n=114), and were collected using a Panel Service. Findings: The results show that a Close/Depend a...

The goal of this study was to develop and test a sequential mediational model explaining the negative relationship of passive leadership to employee well-being. Based on role stress theory, we posit that passive leadership will predict higher levels of role ambiguity, role conflict, and role overload. Invoking Conservation of Resources theory, we f...

Background The effects of surgeons' leadership on team performance are not well understood. The purpose of this study was to examine the simultaneous effects of transformational, passive, abusive supervision and over-controlling leadership behaviors by surgeons on surgical team performance. Methods Trained observers attended 150 randomly selected...

Previous work has conceptualized workplace pro-environmental behaviors within the organizational citizenship behavior framework and a scale to measure these behaviors has been developed. The goal of the present research was to address conceptual and psychometric issues of this scale by: (a) conceptualizing organizational environmental citizenship b...

Women are increasingly represented in high status organizational positions. While the advancement of women into high status roles offers them many organizational benefits, the spillover and crossover effects of these high status positions on their marital relationships remain under explored. In this study, we focus on potential costs to the marital...

Well-being is of the utmost importance to individuals, and the effects of well-being go beyond the individual to affecting their employing organizations. Two essential determinants of individuals’ well-being are sleep and work, and these two activities together take up most of an adult's life. Interestingly they are incompatible with one another as...

While employees’ mental health is the focus of considerable attention from researchers, the public, and policymakers, leaders’ mental health has almost escaped attention. We start by considering several reasons for this, followed by discussions of the effects of leaders’ mental health on their own leadership behaviors, the emotional toll of high-qu...

Based on the contention that leadership has sustained effects on followers even after the leader-follower relationship has ended, we investigated the career-long effects of abusive coach leadership on athlete aggression and task performance. Abusive leadership scores were derived from ratings by two independent raters' evaluations of coaches' biogr...

What characteristics constitute an exemplary leader? Let’s take a moment and reflect on dynamic leaders we have observed during our careers. What is it about them that cause us to consider them exceptional? It may have been one or more significant acts they performed, or perhaps it was an impactful discussion that left an impression on us. Fig. 1 h...

Increasing attention is being paid to the question of why some people emerge as leaders, and we investigated the effects of persistent exposure to poverty during childhood on later leadership role occupancy. We hypothesized that exposure to poverty would limit later leadership role occupancy through the indirect effects of the quality of schooling...

Work withdrawal behaviors (e.g. lateness and absenteeism) are important and costly organizational outcomes and have been of interest to organizations and researchers alike for decades. We begin the chapter by providing construct clarity around what is and should be considered as work withdrawal. We do this by differentiating between two types of wi...

Purpose: The overall purpose of this study was to conduct a qualitative process evaluation of the Adolescence-In-Motion (AIM) intervention. Underpinned by principles of transformational leadership theory (Bass & Riggio, 2006), the overall objective of the AIM intervention was to support physical education teachers in their daily interactions with s...

As we move further into the twenty-first century, the global challenges and consequences posed by climate change are becoming increasingly apparent. Although organizations are considered significant contributors to climate change, they also have the potential to positively affect it through their employees. As a result, understanding how employees’...

Responding to climate change is now a matter for all organizations and employees. Leaders play a key role in affecting employee behavior more generally, so it is likely that they also affect pro-environmental behaviors. This symposium explores the notion of environmental leadership within organizations. Across five presentations we will cover the d...

Based on the notion that the effects of leadership extend well beyond a specific leader-follower relationship, we investigated the career- long effects of abusive supervision on workplace aggression and task performance. Abusive supervision scores were derived from ratings by two independent raters’ evaluations of coaches’ biographies, and workplac...

The relational nature of status implies that to have high status, there must be others of lower status. The relational costs of those status dynamics are the focus of this study. We predict that in the presence of status dispersion, those of lower status will experience envy, which in turn predicts ostracism towards others and perceived ostracism i...

We investigate how gender harassment affects the romantic relationships (i.e., romantic relationship adjustment and romantic relationship efficacy) of female targets (spillover effects) and their romantic partners (crossover effects), and what role targets' anger in response to their gender harassment plays in these relationships. We explored these...

Using conservation of resources theory, we examined the relationship between intimate partner aggression enacted against heterosexual women and 3 types of work-related outcomes for these women: withdrawal while at work (i.e., cognitive distraction, work neglect), withdrawal from work (i.e., partial absenteeism, intentions to quit), and performance....

While there is a large body of research on the effects of being a direct target of workplace aggression, there is far less research on the vicarious experience of aggression at work, despite the fact that more people experience workplace aggression vicariously (i.e., observe it or hear about it) than they do directly. In this study, we develop and...

Poor management and its negative effects on employee wellbeing is well documented in popular culture, the professional world, and academic research. Although it is important to understand the detrimental effects of leadership, a complete understanding of the effects of leadership requires that we also ask whether positive leadership has a positive...

Background: Regular physical activity is associated with a range of physical and psychological health benefits. In North America the majority of adolescents are insufficiently active. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the prospective relationship between adolescents' perceptions of transformational leadership displayed by their s...

Considerable interest has long existed in two separate phenomena of considerable social interest, namely children’s early exposure to employment outside of any organizational, legislative, or collective bargaining protection, and teenage smoking. We used data from a large national survey to address possible direct and indirect links between childre...

The question of whether pay structures should be compressed or dispersed remains unanswered. We argue that pay dispersion can yield uncertainty regarding others' intentions and behaviors; as a result, individuals take a greater risk trusting their group members as pay spreads widen. Accordingly, we explore the conditions under which individuals are...

Regardless of leaders’ efforts to do the right thing and meet performance expectations, they make mistakes, with possible ramifications for followers’ and leaders’ well-being. Some leaders will apologize following transgressions, which may have positive implications for their followers’ and their own well-being, contingent upon the nature and sever...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate leaders’ use of humor as an expression of how they value themselves relative to others. The paper suggests that humor can minimize or exacerbate the status differences between leaders and followers. The paper hypothesizes that leaders’ use of self‐ or in‐group‐deprecating humor would be positively...

Climate change is a serious global issue that poses many risks to environmental and human systems. Although human activity is cited as the main cause of climate change and organizations significantly contribute to climate change, research that investigates workplace pro‐environmental behaviors remains scarce. We develop and test a model that links...

We focus on the differential outcomes associated with experiencing workplace aggression and sexual harassment by a supervisor. To do so, we identify and empirically address several issues within current workplace aggression and sexual harassment research, including the need to (a) conceptualize their multidimensional nature, (b) contrast comparable...

This study addressed the effects of children's understanding of social learning principles on divergent areas of behavior: two indices of self-control, grade scores, personality and conduct problems, immaturity, and subcultural delinquency. Using an orthogonal 2 × 2 (Understanding of Social Learning Principles × Age) multivariate analysis of varian...

This study investigated the effects of different reinforcement conditions on intelligence test performance. Middle- and upper-class boys and girls (N = 47, [Xbar] age = 10 years 4 months) of above-average intelligence ([Xbar] IQ = 115.66) were randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions: viz., material or social externally or self-adminis...

The relationship between self-reinforcement behavior and one index of mental health—viz., Maslow’s need hierarchy—was investigated. Ninety-three university students (21 males, 72 females; X age = 18.7 years) completed Bellack et al. ‘s. Time Completion Test to measure self-reinforcement behavior, while Barling’s Need Hierarchy questionnaire assesse...

Previous research on the moral foundations of transformational leadership has focused primarily on stage of justice reasoning; this study focuses on developmental mode of care reasoning. Multilevel regression analyses were conducted on data coded from interviews with a sample of Canadian public sector managers (N = 58) and survey responses from the...

The relationship between employees’ perceptions of their managers’ transformational leadership style and employees’ psychological well-being was examined in two studies. In Study 1, trust in the leader fully mediated the positive relationship between perceptions of managers’ transformational leadership and employee psychological well-being in a cro...

Although the importance of followership has been discussed in organizational literature, negative connotations attached to the follower label persist, including followers’ lack of ability and power. In two studies, we found evidence for negative effects of the follower label. Participants who were labeled a follower (Study 1), or self-labeled as fo...

A model of pseudo-transformational leadership was tested in 4 experiments. Pseudo-transformational leadership is defined by self-serving, yet highly inspirational leadership behaviors, unwillingness to encourage independent thought in subordinates, and little caring for one's subordinates more generally. Study 1 (N = 167) used vignettes to differen...

We draw upon transformational leadership theory to develop an instrument to measure transformational parenting for use with adolescents. First, potential items were generated that were developmentally appropriate and evidence for content validity was provided through the use of focus groups with parents and adolescents. We subsequently provide evid...

The adequacy of Mowday, Porter & Steers' (1982) model of organizational commitment for predicting both company and union commitment was assessed. Data were obtained from 100 members of a white-collar union. Two months before this study, they had taken part in a three-week strike and were still involved in a dispute with management. Measures of comp...

Based on transformational leadership theory, we generate and test a teacher development intervention designed to modify physical education teachers' transformational teaching behaviors, and their adolescent students' self-determined motivation, self-efficacy, and intentions to be physically active. Using a randomised control group design (11 teache...

To assess the role of self-determined performance standards (stringent versus lenient) and locus of control (LOC) beliefs (self versus external) on children's self-regulation of academic behaviour, measures of arithmetic and verbal persistence and accuracy were obtained from 32 children of average IQ (mean age = 9.84 years). An orthogonal 2 × 2 (pe...

Purpose – Prior research has demonstrated the positive effects of high involvement work systems on various outcomes but none to date has conducted a comparative test of alternative, plausible models of these systems. This paper aims to address this issue. Design/methodology/approach – A test of five high involvement work system models was conducte...

We draw from transformational leadership theory (Bass & Riggio, 2006) to develop a reliable and valid measure of transformational teaching, for use within school-based physical education contexts. In Phase 1, we utilized established instrument development procedures, involving teachers, students, and experts in transformational leadership theory to...

To examine the predictive effects of perceived injustice in two different interpersonal relationships (i.e., working relationship with a supervisor, romantic relationship with a partner) on aggression enacted in those relationships, we computed a series of multilevel regressions on 62 heterosexual couples with all 124 partners employed part-time an...

Reports an error in "Comparing perceived injustices from supervisors and romantic partners as predictors of aggression" by Kathryne E. Dupré, Nick Turner, Julian Barling and Chris B. Stride (Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, np). Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/ a0020520), the order of authorship was listed incorrectly. The correc...

Parenting is a critical social determinant of the health-related behaviours of adolescents. In this article, we argue that extending transformational leadership theory to parenting presents an opportunity for developing a useful conceptual model for (a) understanding the relationships between parenting and adolescents’ health behaviours and (b) sup...

Status structures in organizations are ubiquitous yet largely ignored in organizational research. We offer a conceptualization of team status inequality, or the extent to which status positions on a team are dispersed. Status inequality is hypothesized to be negatively related to individual performance and physical health for low-status individuals...