ABSTRACT

The tight and simultaneous combination of moral, benevolent and authoritarian leadership as well as the negative impact of authoritarian leadership imposes challenges to paternalistic leadership researchers. We used three-way tests to investigate the relationships among three dimensions of paternalistic leadership and our results indicate that the relationship between benevolent/moral leadership and leadership effectiveness is stronger for high than for low authoritarian leadership. In addition, when a leader has low benevolent and/or moral leadership, low authoritarianism has higher leadership effectiveness than high authoritarianism. However, when both benevolent and moral leadership are high, high authoritarianism works better than low authoritarianism.