Narcissistic Leadership and Resistance to Change: Mediating Role of Cynicism

Abstract

The aim of the study is to examine the effect of narcissistic leadership and resistance to change
through the mediating role of organizational cynicism. Transactional Theory of Stress is used to explain
the mechanisms which state that person appraise the situation and according to this appraisal they
interpret the situation as hindrance or challenging. Using moderated regression analyses technique, we
have tested our hypothesis. With independent measures for antecedents (self-reports) and consequences
(peer-reports, we have used two-source field data (N = 250). The CFA is also performed to establish
discriminant validity among the variables. Our results indicate that narcissistic leadership has a
significant and positive relationship with organization cynicism. And organization cynicism further has
significant relationship with change resistance. Future research can examine the other mechanism
through which Narcissistic leadership produce positive outcomes and also other antecedents of
organization cynicism.