How do leaders react when treated unfairly? Leader narcissism and self-interested behavior in response to unfair treatment.

In this paper we employ a trait activation framework to examine how unfairness perceptions influence narcissistic leaders' self-interested behavior, and the downstream implications of these effects for employees' prosocial and voice behaviors.Specifically, we propose that narcissistic leaders are particularly likely to engage in self-interested behavior when they perceive that their organizations treat them unfairly, and that this self-interested behavior in turn decreases followers' prosocial behavior and voice.Data from a multisource, time-lagged survey of 211 team leaders and 1205 subordinates provided support for the hypothesized model.Implications for theory and practice are discussed.