In today’s competitive world, organizations may value competitive leaders who strive to outperform others. Yet, past research shows that such leaders can also harm the organization through their own harmful attitudes and behaviors. In this paper, we contend that the detrimental effects highlighted in past research may reflect only part of the story, and that leaders who focus on outperforming others can also indirectly harm the organization by eliciting harmful behavior in employees. Drawing on Achievement Goal Theory, we propose that leaders with high performance-approach goals (i.e., striving to outperform others) will be more likely to provide their employees with comparative feedback, in which an employee’s performance is discussed and evaluated by explicitly comparing it to the performance of other employees. Building on insights from Feedback Intervention Theory, we further argue that receiving comparative feedback from a leader will engender feelings of emotional exhaustion among employees, and eventually lead them to withdraw from their work by engaging in counterproductive work behavior. Data from a three-wave survey design using multi-source reports from 631 employees and 221 corresponding leaders supported our hypotheses. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and future research and offer practical implications for organizations.
