Leadership is a process occurring within a broad social system with followers in an organizational setting. However, leadership research has failed to deeply explore how leaders, followers and contexts combine to produce organizational outcomes.
Aiming to contribute to the study of these overlooked questions, we developed four studies. The first study predicted that job autonomy buffers the relationship between abusive supervision, psychosomatic symptoms and deviance. The second study suggests that task characteristics moderate the association between abusive supervision, distributive justice and job satisfaction. The third study proposes that proactive personality acts as a leadership substitute in the relationship between ethical leadership, emotions and OCBs. Our fourth study showed that followership schema and top management openness determine the LMX quality, with consequences for employee behaviors. Our findings suggest that follower characteristics, organizational practices and contextual variables constitute important boundary conditions for the impact of leader behaviors on employee outcomes
