Investigating the effects of toxic leadership on organizational citizenship behavior and employees turnover with moderating role of organizational commitment

A major challenge organizations face today is employing high performing employees with high organizational commitment. A factor affecting the success and failure of an organization is the leadership style of managers. One of the leadership styles is toxic leadership whose behaviors cause serious harm to the organization and employees. The behaviors of organizational leaders play an effective role in organizational commitment, employee turnover, organizational citizenship behavior, and employee productivity. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate firstly the effects of toxic leadership on the organizational citizenship behavior, secondly, the effects of toxic leadership on employee turnover, and finally the moderating role of organizational commitment on these relationships. Statistical population was all staff employees of a public organization from which 350 were selected randomly as sample. Data collection tool was a questionnaire and both face validity and construct validity were used to assess the validity of the questionnaire. Cronbach's alpha test with SPSS software was used for assessing the reliability of the questionnaire. For data analysis, first data was extracted from the questionnaire and then they was analyzed by the statistical software SPSS22 and PLS3. For inferential statistics, structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to investigate the research hypotheses, the relationships between variables, and the generalization of the results obtained from the sample to the statistical population of the research. The findings indicated that there was an insignificant negative relationship between toxic leadership and organizational citizenship behavior; however, the relationship between toxic leadership and employee turnover was positive and significant; organizational commitment didn't play a moderating role in the relationship between toxic leadership and organizational citizenship behavior and also in the relationship between toxic leadership and employee turnover.