Let’s Talk About Exclusion: A Multi-Level Model of Destructive Leadership and Psychological Functioning of Employees With Common Mental Disorders

The prevalence rates of Common Mental Disorders (CMDs) worldwide are at an all-time high. Workplaces are especially impacted by this phenomenon. As organizations strive to leverage the full potential of all employees, leaders are responsible for the inclusion of employees with CMDs by providing them with the necessary support. Challenging the positivity bias in research on leadership and inclusion, we offer a nuanced understanding of why support is often lacking, ultimately resulting in the exclusion of these employees. Our multi-level model conceptualizes how destructive leadership hinders the organizational inclusion and contributes to the exclusion of employees with CMDs by specifically considering the factors that explain under which conditions leaders are more likely to display destructive leadership behaviors towards employees with CMDs. Our model incorporates job demands and resources (JD-R) theory with temporal theorizing to elucidate the adverse impact of destructive leadership on the psychological functioning of employees with CMDs and the development, over time, of a reciprocal downward spiral between employee psychological functioning and destructive leadership. We call for future research to incorporate this perspective as it will (1) enrich extant understanding of the individual, team, and organizational factors that engender the phenomenon and (2) identify paths that make organizations more effective and more substantively inclusive by breaking the downward spiral.