Effects of trust and psychological contract violation on authentic leadership and organizational deviance

Purpose - The aim of this article is to examine the relationships between authentic leadership and organizational deviance and to test the moderating effects of trust and psychological contract violation on that relationship. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from ten state universities in Turkey. The sample included 848 lecturers and their department chairs chosen randomly. Moderated hierarchical regression was used to examine the moderating roles of trust and psychological contract violation on the authentic leadership and organizational deviance relationship. Findings – The results show that authentic leadership is negatively and significantly correlated with organizational deviance. In addition, the results of the hierarchical multiple regression analyses support the moderating effects of employee trust and psychological contract violation with regard to the relationship between authentic leadership and organizational deviance. Practical implications – Given that authentic leadership is associated with valued organizational outcomes such as lower workplace deviance, higher followers' commitment, job satisfaction and citizenship behaviors, organizational efforts to foster authentic leadership should prove fruitful. Moreover, focusing on efforts to improve leader-follower relationship and to create a trust-based work environment could increase the likelihood that authentic leadership will lower level of workplace deviance. Originality/value – This study contributes to the research on authentic leadership and workplace deviance by showing that trust and psychological contract are relevant affect-related variables in determining the importance of authentic leadership perception to subordinate workplace deviance. Furthermore, by incorporating trust and psychological contract (for the first time), it is a response to recent calls for integration of authentic leadership, organizational deviance, trust and psychological contract literatures (Gardner et al.; Ilies et al.). These calls have contended that trust and high quality leader-follower relations are fundamental to linking authentic leader behavior to follower behaviors, yet to date empirical evidence does not exist.