Tunde Ogunfowora

Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, Canada 

“On the structure and nomological network of gaslighting within the context of leader-employee dyads at work”

Abstract

In recent years, the term gaslighting has become popular for describing deliberate attempts to psychologically harm another by undermining their sense of reality. Although gaslighting has been mainly studied in romantic relationships, recent work suggests that gaslighting occurs in other contexts where power imbalance exists. The current research aims to a) conceptualize gaslighting within the leader-employee relationship, b) differentiate between leaders’ use of gaslighting tactics and employees’ psychological experience of being gaslighted, and c) develop and test a comprehensive nomological network. We began with scale development to identify items to separately measure leader gaslighting tactics and employee experienced gaslighting state. Next, we examined their psychometric properties and factor structures in three studies (Total N = 1054), along with qualitative evaluations of employee narratives. Finally, we tested our proposed nomological network in a time-lagged study of 632 employees and 194 supervisors. CFA results show that leader gaslighting is composed of a general gaslighting factor, as well as a domain-specific “reality distortion” factor, while employee experienced gaslighting includes both a “self-doubt” and “dread-avoidance” factor. Moderated mediation results show that self-doubt and dread-avoidance differentially mediate the effects of the general leader gaslighting factor on self-focused (e.g., organizational-based self-esteem), performance-focused (e.g., task performance), supervisor-focused (e.g., supervisor-directed impression management), and coworker-focused (e.g., ostracism by and jealousy towards coworkers) outcomes. Corresponding effects of the leader reality distortion factor were weaker in comparison. However, exploratory analyses show that reality distortion tactics magnify the negative, indirect effects of general gaslighting tactics on employee outcomes. Lastly, in line with expectation, many indirect effects were stronger when the employee reported higher (versus lower) LMX relationship quality with the leader. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of gaslighting in the workplace.