Authoritarian leaders make unilateral decisions and prevail over subordinates. Such leadership, as a style of exercising formal authority and position power, may inhibit employees’ extra-role behaviors in the hierarchical role structure. We explore employees’ role perceptions to better understand how supervisors’ authoritarian leadership decreases extra-role behaviors (OCBs). Authoritarian behavior is expected to generate subordinate perceptions of role conflict, role ambiguity, and role overload, with consequent negative effects on OCB. Hypotheses are tested using data from 613 subordinate – supervisor dyads. Empirical results indicate that authoritarian leadership increases subordinate role conflict and overload which then decreases OCB. Authoritarian behavior also increases role ambiguity, but role ambiguity is not associated with OCB. The article concludes with research suggestions and practical implications.

Few studies have presented structural turnover models including both job satisfaction and organizational commitment measures. Recent research suggests that perceived supervisor leadership may contribute to employee well-being, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. This study proposes a structural turnover intention model including supervisory behavior (person-oriented and task-oriented dimensions), job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Furthermore, the study proposes to test whether this model fits in both small- and medium-sized enterprises and in large enterprises. The sample included 763 employees from different types of organizations who have completed a measure of their perception of their supervisor’s behavior and self-administrated measures of job satisfaction, organizational commitment and turnover intention. Results show that person-oriented leadership behavior affects turnover intentions through job satisfaction and organizational commitment more than task-oriented leadership behavior. Only organizational commitment had a direct effect in explaining turnover intention. Finally, results indicate that the model is applicable both in small- and medium-sized enterprises and large enterprises.