Buffering the Dark Side of Leadership: The Role of Green Human Resource Management Practices in Mitigating Exploitative Leadership and Fostering Employee Green Innovative Behavior

Abstract

This study investigates how exploitative leadership diminishes employees’ green innovative behavior, emphasizing the mediating role of emotional exhaustion and the moderating role of Green Human Resource Management (GHRM). Drawing on resource depletion theory, we argue that exploitative leadership drains employees’ psychological resources, reducing their capacity for environmentally innovative behaviors. Using a three-wave design with a synthetic dataset (N = 400) constructed to reflect theoretical expectations, we test a moderated-mediation model through regression and bootstrapping techniques. Results demonstrate that emotional exhaustion significantly mediates the relationship between exploitative leadership and green innovation, while GHRM weakens the positive association between exploitative leadership and exhaustion. Conditional indirect effects reveal that the indirect pathway from exploitative leadership to reduced green innovation is strongest when GHRM is weak and substantially weaker when GHRM is strong. These findings extend destructive leadership research into the environmental domain and highlight the protective role of organizational-level HRM systems. Implications for leadership development and sustainability practices are discussed.

Keywords: Exploitative leadership, emotional exhaustion, green innovative behavior, Green HRM, moderated mediation.