The good side of authoritarian leaders: leader in the eyes of the subordinates

Abstract Although subordinate's perception of authoritarian leadership is viewed derogatively in the leadership literature, limited studies still claim that it can positively influence subordinate's performance. Drawing from the attribution theory, we hypothesize and demonstrate that subordinate's perception of authoritarian leadership can have a positive, indirect effect on subordinate task performance through the subordinate-attributed performance promotion motive, but only when the subordinate's perception of leader's expert power is high. We found support for our hypothesized model using multisource data collected from 246 subordinates and 76 supervisors from 11 different private sector organizations in Pakistan.